


Better Angels

by Lynzee005



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: BAMF Audrey, Dark & Twisty, Dubious Consent, F/M, FBI Special Agent Audrey Horne, Future Fic, Hints of Cooper/Albert, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Language, Light Bondage, Non-Consensual Bondage, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Playlist, Post-Lodge, Post-Series, Rape/Non-con Elements, Rough Sex, Smut, Strangulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-08-28 14:26:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 32,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8449756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lynzee005/pseuds/Lynzee005
Summary: She can't explain it; none of them can. They don't even know where to begin. All they know is that, in the dark of night, he's a different man, harder and more brilliant than before. He's dangerous then, potentially deadly, brutal and angry and Stygian dark.Problem is...Audrey loves being scared of the dark.





	1. Never Look Back, Never Give Up...

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this story idea in my head since my last visit to Los Angeles...driving along Mulholland at midnight from Hollywood to Santa Monica and back just because...and I finally had to put it down in words. I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> Chapter title from the song "Falling" by Haim.

^♢^

“ _It is curious to imagine these people of the world, busy in thought, turning their eyes towards the countless spheres that shine above us, and making them reflect the only images their minds contain…So do the shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed._ "

\- Charles Dickens

* * *

^♢^

It had been a five hour flight, not counting the hour on the runway at the Philadelphia International because of the wait time to have the plane wings de-iced, nor the twenty minutes on the tarmac at LAX. But as she launched herself out into the surprisingly muggy heat outside, with just a carry-on over her shoulder, she made her way to the first cab she could find, ignoring the slight sciatic discomfort in her right hip and her mounting fatigue and annoyance at the hassle it had taken to get her there.

“Where to?” the driver asked as she got into the backseat.

She pulled out her reservation papers from the front pocket of her carry-on. “All-Star Rental Cars, Hollywood,” she said, giving him the address. “Hurry please.”

“There’s a Lakers game tonight, lady,” the man said. “Ain’t nothin’ gonna be quick about this one.”

She sat back in her seat and hissed between her teeth. Closing her eyes, she tried to stay calm, but the tug of anxiety in her ribcage, the one that pulled on her diaphragm and made it hard to breathe, insisted upon itself once again. She wished she'd had that second drink on the plane.

The driver pulled out onto West Century Boulevard and Audrey leaned her head back against the seat rest. She stared out at the darkened palm trees, the orange glow of the street lights illuminating her face and shining her reflection back at her in the window as they pulled out into traffic. _You’ve waited this long_ , she reminded herself. Her right hand found the ring on her left, and she began to twirl it around the base of her finger. _What’s a bit of a traffic delay going to matter now?_

The driver eyed her in the rearview mirror. “You in town on business or what?”

She skirted her eyes up to meet his but didn’t hold his gaze long. “You could say that."

He continued to watch her in between aggressive lane-changes that caught Audrey's breath in her throat. He initially appeared to be middle-aged, but Audrey supposed the balding was premature and thus couldn't place his age with any certainty; if she were pressed to guess, she'd had put him at late-thirties. The cab was clean, cleaner than she'd expected, and decorated with the usual personal effects—a Wayne Gretzky L.A. Kings bobblehead on the dashboard, a small photo of two young children taped next to the radio dial, the obligatory tree-shaped car deodorizer hanging from the rear view mirror—but the man drove recklessly, even for Los Angeles, which made Audrey wonder if he was nearing the end of his shift or just couldn't be bothered to give a shit.

“What business?” the man asked finally.

She took a breath and readjusted herself in her seat. “Federal Bureau of Investigations.”

“No shit,” the man said with an appreciative nod as they pulled up to an intersection, stopping at the red light before turning onto Sepulveda. The glaring lights of the airport gave way to the lights of the roadway, considerably dimmer and moodier. Audrey relished the change.

“You packin’ then?” he asked.

She didn’t answer the question. As he accelerated through the green light and continued north, she sat up in her seat. “Look, pal, don’t screw me around on the drive,” she said. “I may not be from around here but I know when I'm being taken for a ride. We don't need to go anywhere near the Staples Centre to get to Hollywood, and at this time of night, it shouldn't take more than twenty five minutes to get where I need to go. Am I being clear here?"

The driver made a disapproving noise in the back of his throat and continued to drive. "I wasn't gonna..."

Audrey turned her face to look out the window again. The driver grew quiet. And twenty four and a half totally silent minutes later, they pulled into the parking lot of the 24-hour rental company where she’d booked her car.

As she reached across to pay the man, he caught her eye.

“It was a real pleasure meeting you, Agent…”

She blinked slowly at him, taking in the sight of his grizzled face, stubbled to the point where she knew he hadn’t seen a razor blade in more than a few days. His fingers were short, fat; his nails were dirty. But he had kind eyes. She felt bad for assuming he'd been out to screw her.

“Agent Horne,” she said finally. “FBI Special Agent Audrey Horne.”

“Well, Agent Horne,” he nodded. “Good luck with whatever brings you to the City of Angels.”

With that she scooted out of the car and into the night. The cab pealed off; cool halogen enveloped her, and she shivered in spite of herself.

She glanced at her watch. It was 9:30.

_Good luck with whatever brings you to City of Angels._

She looked up at the clear sky above her head. She couldn’t see any stars; it was such a different sky than the one she was used to, and yet it wasn’t different enough. Not for this journey. She twirled the ring again around her finger.

_Yeah_ , she thought with a shake of her head. _You’ve traveled clear across the country, on nothing more than a couple of credit card receipts and a hunch to guide you. You’re gonna need more than luck to bring him home._

It didn’t matter though.

When it came to Dale Cooper, Audrey knew, she was prepared to do just about anything.

^♢^


	2. I'm Gonna Show You Where It's Dark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title taken from "Nightcall" by Kavinsky.

^♢^

Agent Cooper had gone missing late on a Saturday night; by Sunday morning, all they knew was that he'd bought a plane ticket to Los Angeles. In a city of that many people, finding him without anything more to go on would have been harder than finding the proverbial needle. But it hadn't deterred Audrey from booking herself on the earliest flight she could find, which took off at 6:05pm Eastern time Sunday evening. 

An hour before she'd boarded, they'd picked up his trail at a motel in the central L.A. neighbourhood of Echo Park. So that's where Audrey went immediately after picking up her car, arriving just in time to see Dale walk out of his room and into his own rental car, speeding out of the parking lot and onto the busy road in front.

She'd been following him ever since.

Now, parked in the darkened lot of a shuttered pharmacy across Sunset Boulevard from the twenty-four hour convenience store he'd stopped at, Audrey counted both sides of her luck, the stars and shit. Albert hung on patiently on the other end of the cellular phone.

“How are you feeling?” he asked finally, after a long pause that followed her breathless recitation of every event that had taken place since she stepped off the plane well over two hours earlier.

“Fine,” Audrey breathed, flexing her toes within the red pumps on her feet. “The flight was shit.”

“Aren’t they always?”

"Yeah but this one was especially terrible," she said, recounting the delays. "If the plane had been on time I would already have him in the car with me, heading back to the airport—”

"Like hell you would," Albert replied.

Audrey cranked her neck hard to one side and rolled her shoulders in an abortive attempt to release the pressure in her spine from hours in the narrow, cramped cabin. She'd need a massage when she got back, and thought about calling in the morning to make an appointment. In the meantime, the tightness in her shoulders and the coils of pain crackling up her spine were there to stay; there was nothing for it.

She sighed and took the opportunity to scan the road up and down in both directions before honing in once again on the sign above the door to the convenience store across the street. "You don't know that."

Albert paused for a long moment on the other end of the phone and Audrey heard him lighting a cigarette, the clatter of a metal lighter and his deep exhale on the other end. “Look, I think I know Dale Cooper. And I sure as shit know how _this_ plays out. It's the same thing, every damn time."

She bristled at the insinuation that perhaps she didn’t know better; sitting up in her seat, she felt herself steeling for battle. “And what the hell is _that_ supposed to mean?” she asked.

“It means that _you’ve_ been dealing with him— _really_ doing this shit—for five years,” he spat. “And _I’ve_ been doing it for a _hell_ of lot longer than that.” He paused, taking another drag from his cigarette. “Damn it, Audrey, you of all people should be used to this by now, so stop acting like this is your first fucking rodeo."

_He's not wrong_ , Audrey thought to herself. _But he could be nicer about it.._.

“Hell, Albert, don’t hold back. Tell me how you _really_ feel,” she spoke softly.

Audrey glanced at her watch and exhaled. Instinct drew her hands together and she began obsessing over the ring on her finger until it no longer felt like a ring but was hot and raw against her skin. She knew she'd have a rash there in the morning; she could feel the little blisters, painful pinpricks just beneath the band on the top of her finger. She dropped her hand, flexing it twice before relaxing it against her thigh, only to find it tense up of its own accord into a tight fist.

None of this was new. Maybe she didn't have the history that Albert had, but he was right: she wasn't some newbie, either. It had been five years; she was, as far as anyone else was concerned, a seasoned pro. Still, time hadn’t made anything easier. The long list of _if onlys_ never got any shorter, no matter how many times Albert or Gordon or even Dale himself tried to assuage her guilt: _If only I’d gone with him instead of staying at my desk…if only I’d picked up on the signals instead of burying myself in work…if only I’d paid attention ten years ago…if only I’d listened…_

She lifted her eyes towards those unfamiliar skies and knew she was telling herself lies again. There was no different answer to be had. _If only_ she had the chance, she knew she wouldn’t have chosen a different path. And maybe that was the worst part: that, deep down, she liked all of this.

None of that changed the fact that she was still unaccustomed to things not going her way. ”Where is he?" she muttered aloud as her impatience with the unexpected stakeout grew. There was only one way in and one way out; he hadn't come out since she'd been there, of that much she was certain. "What if I missed him? Or— _God!_ —what if he's in there right now doing whatever—"

“Jesus, Audrey!” Albert warned before relenting. “This borrowing trouble bit has got to stop. It's bullshit. Take a goddamn pill and relax." He sighed. "Christ Almighty!”

That was when Audrey remembered who she was talking to. She reminded herself that it was nearly two in the morning in Philadelphia and he was still awake, that he'd been waiting for her call. He wouldn’t be doing that if he didn’t give a shit. Albert gave more shits than most people did, in fact. He wasn’t one of the bad guys.

The deep gravel of his voice—capable of making interns cry and grown men have second thoughts about crossing him—reassured Audrey like almost no other, in spite of the harshness of his words. She felt her pulse steadying; her heart no longer thudded against her ribcage. She shut her eyes and nodded to herself, deciding now would be the time to take the high road, since she knew Albert would never deign to do the same, not even for her.

"I'm sorry Albert," she whispered, measuring her tone against the steadying thrum of her heartbeat still swimming in her ears.

There was a long pause on his end; she heard him drag on his cigarette, exhaling close enough to the receiver that she could practically smell the smoke. Audrey had quit years ago, replacing one vice with several others.

In that moment, all she wanted was a drink.

Finally Albert replied. “Don’t worry about it, Cherry."

She nodded again, a small smile on her face.

A trio of streetwalkers ambled up in front of Audrey's car. One of them peered through the windshield but, upon seeing it was a woman in the driver's seat, sneered and turned her back. Audrey felt a touch of indignation at what she construed as a rejection. She stifled it, shoving it down to the place she kept the unwelcome stuff she had to swallow for the sake of propriety or her job. An earlier version of herself might have said something; the Audrey sitting behind the wheel of the car on that night had learned a thing or two about picking her battles.

But it didn't change what she felt. _Maybe I could do with a good screw right now, did you ever think about that?_ she thought as she watched the sneering woman's ass retreat into the shadows between streetlights. She laughed a little to herself. _Priorities, Audrey_ , she thought. _Drink first, fuck second._

"What's funny?" Albert asked.

Audrey blinked and tore her eyes away from the women, casting her eyes in a wide arc up and down the street again. "I just have a feeling, about tonight...about this place, this city," she said, looking up again to the sky. "It's dark, you know, but it's a bright darkness. Like you can see what’s in the shadows still. Maybe it’s all the neon.” She sighed. "The sky isn't like it is back home, you know? I mean back in Twin Peaks. I've never seen a sky like that before, not anywhere else..."

Albert’s chuckle broke through her hazy reverie and she stopped speaking.

“You know? You sound just like him when you talk like that,” he said.

Audrey was taken aback, and for the first time since the last time she saw Dale, she felt the choking anxiety in her chest ease off. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” she told him.

“Well…” Albert returned after a brief pause, before trailing off, letting the word hang there unabsorbed in the vast distance between them.

That’s when Audrey spotted him: walking through the automatic sliding doors of the convenience store with a large paper bag in his arms.

“There he is,” she said.

"Coop?" 

Audrey _Mm-hmm'd_ as she watched him, making sure it _was_ him and not some incredibly similar double. He walked towards his car and deposited the bag into the backseat, but rather than getting into the car again, he locked the door and continued down the road away from the parking lot on foot. Audrey removed the keys from the ignition.

"He's on the move. Walking. Heading west on Sunset." She opened the car door and stepped out into the parking lot.

“Hey—”

She balanced the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she locked the car door behind her. “Yeah?”

Albert's sigh of was crisp, clipped short. She wondered if it was possible that he was as anxious as she was.

“Whatever you do, Audrey, just come back to us in one piece, Agent Horne,” he said, adding: “Both of you, if you can swing it.”

She liked it when he called her by her title; it gave her a little thrill that she felt in the soles of her feet and the back of her neck. “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” she told him.

He took another deep breath. “And for the love of god…be careful.”

Audrey nodded as her heart swelled. “Love you too, big guy,” she said, listening for his quiet laughter on the other end before saying her goodbye and flipping the mobile phone closed. His words were sweet, but they gave her pause.

She knew all too well how this could end.

With renewed caution and years of training behind her eyes and living in her fingertips, Audrey pushed the door to the car open and stepped out onto the sidewalk, crossing Sunset Boulevard against traffic.

^♢^


	3. Misplacin' Her Sleep to Keep the World Nearer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set in February, 1990.
> 
> Chapter title taken from "flood on the floor" by Purity Ring

^♢^

_Audrey stood outside the girls’ bathroom—next to the water fountains and across the hall from where she’d once upon a time conjugated verbs in French class—and practiced her speech for the assembled crowd inside the high school gymnasium-cum-auditorium. Staring at her reflection in the glass display case, she smoothed her finger over the dramatic rise in her left eyebrow, peeking out from beneath the careful wave of hair that fell across her forehead._

Lipstick: check. Eyeliner: check. Fix the necklace clasp: done. _She pinched the apples of her cheeks and smiled at herself, but her eyes caught the photo frame just behind the glass and she stopped._

_A new homecoming queen’s picture smiled back at her from the place where Laura’s photo had sat only one year earlier. It might as well have been the same picture, though; same smile, same tiara, same blonde hair piled high atop her head._

_Audrey reached out and touched the glass lightly, tracing the outline of the picture frame. “The more things change…” she whispered. But she didn’t finish her thought, recognizing it for the false pretense that it represented. Nothing was ever going to be the same in this town ever again._

_The previous Saturday had been the anniversary of Laura’s death, and the town and its dignitaries had decided that the best way to honour her memory was to announce a memorial scholarship in her name. Most of the town had shown up on account; they were all filing into the auditorium behind the wall Audrey was standing against, waiting for the ceremony to begin._

_Audrey thought it was terribly tacky that it was set up as a community service scholarship, intended to go to the student who best exemplified Laura’s devotion to extra-curricular activities. Privately, she wondered if the people in charge of this were aware of the irony or if they were truly ignorant of the dark secrets Laura kept hidden behind her placid exterior; if they were ignorant, was it willful, part of the lie they told themselves about the town they all lived in?_

_All she knew was that if Laura had been alive to see it, she would have laughed in their faces. And honestly, Audrey would have joined right in._

_Publicly, however, Audrey had to keep her mouth shut; her father had been the single biggest contributor to the scholarship fund, part of his road toward redemption which was, as Audrey knew, about as real as the Yellow Brick one. His brush with his own social conscience had been all-too-brief; Audrey was nowhere near convinced that this most recent show of educational altruism was any different, but the people in the other room were none the wiser. Of course, as with everything Benjamin Horne did, it only went so far; Audrey was there as his representative since he apparently couldn't be bothered to actually attend in person._

_She cast a scornful glance at the closed door to the backstage wings, where could hear the rising din echoing off the brilliantly polished floor and the plastic bleachers in the cavernous space just beyond. She didn’t want to give a speech, least of all on behalf of her father’s company. With a glance at the speech in her hand and then another across the hall at Mdme. Clement’s French classroom, Audrey sighed. “C’est la vie, right?” she whispered._

_The only silver lining to the festivities was that she knew that Dale Cooper had been invited back as well, to be given the keys to the city by the Twin Peaks Chamber of Commerce for services rendered during Laura's case the year before._

_It was a double-edged sword. Audrey’s affections for the FBI Agent had not waned since his hasty departure from their small mountainside enclave the previous Spring. Of course she’d had other things to occupy her mind. Her recovery from the debilitating injuries she’d suffered in the explosion at the Twin Peaks Savings & Loan the year before had been arduous and long. But against the odds, there she was, her youthful bones, tendons, and ligaments healed and in miraculous shape._

_She couldn’t say the same for the others, and that fact gave her pause. She knew she was lucky to be there at all._

_He had visited her in the hospital—as it turned out, for the last time—but she didn’t remember much of it. Fleeting images, impressions really: his face, the low tremulous timbre of his voice as he spoke, the haunted expression in his eyes, a gentle kiss goodbye. It all blended together and turned itself over and over in her mind until she wasn’t sure what was real and what was a result of the painkillers._

_When she finally regained the part of herself the hospital had deadened, he was gone. But she had him in her dreams, so it didn’t really matter. She closed her eyes every night, and there he was, and while it was a poor substitute for the real thing, it was enough for her._

_Always intense and brooding, the Cooper of her dreams was not the same curiously cerebral man she had come to know; in her dreams he moved through the world like a shadow, slipping around with reckless charm, a sinister smile, and a hint of malice living beneath his skin. She always met him in the same nightmarish red room, and every dream ended with a kiss before she awoke, like Sleeping Beauty. He wasn’t evil, but he wasn’t altogether good, either. It was alluring and repulsive. As months wore on the line between dream and night terror became blurred, and the danger and the sensuality heightened with every passing night until she woke up sweating and calling his name, as often in the throes of ecstasy as in the depths of fear, at least two or three times a week. With each nightfall, a part of her dreaded what she might dream about, which made it all the more difficult to fall asleep; but an equal part of her looked forward to what he would do when he appeared._

_Audrey had many reasons to fear the dark—a lifetime spent in Twin Peaks was more than enough to do that. And yet, in the year since her life and everyone else’s had been turned upside down, when she closed her eyes at night and tried to sleep, it wasn’t memories of the explosion or thoughts of the woods that haunted her; it was his face._

_Now, the thought of seeing him—knowing that in her most private moments she had imagined him doing things to her that she couldn't even name—sent her mind spinning._

_Audrey looked down at her hands and realized her palms were sweating. She flattened them against her hips and the pleated trousers she wore, then closed her eyes and shook her head. “Focus,” she scolded herself. It would all be over soon. Regardless of what else happened, Audrey was washing her hands of this place. At 11:45pm, she was boarding a plane to Seattle. She was enrolled in classes; she was going to start college. And she’d do it on her own, away from the cancerous influence of her father and the Horne family name, and the incestuous town in which both set their roots._

_In twelve hours, she would never have to set foot in Twin Peaks ever again. And sometime between now and then, she knew she’d see Agent Cooper for the first time since the last time. It was enough to make her giddy._

_But first, the speech. Returning her eyes to the page, Audrey attempted a last rehearsal. But her attention was diverted to a sound coming from the intersecting hallway, behind her and to her left. She had thought she was alone; the sound surprised her. Turning on her heel she stepped across the hallway, the heels of her shoes striking the tile floor with imposing gravitas usually reserved for school faculty members and which she felt was wholly incongruous coming from her own feet._

_Peering down the empty hallway from around the corner, she saw two black-suited men standing, facing one another. One of them had his back against the bank of lockers, his hands shoved into his pockets; he was leaning forward from his hips, his forehead resting comfortably against the other man’s shoulder. The second man had his hand resting against the nape of the first man’s neck, holding him steady. It appeared as though the first man was crying._

_The first man was Agent Cooper; the man holding him was his gruff FBI colleague, Agent Rosenfield._

_Cooper lifted his head, and Rosenfield placed his hand on Cooper's cheek, a tender gesture that Audrey was sure went beyond simple friendship. The two men shared a look; hushed words were spoken; the second man nodded as Cooper pulled his suit jacket off and began rolling up the sleeve of his dress shirt._

_Rosenfield retrieved a syringe from his pocket and placed it between his teeth; then he took Cooper's arm in his and began to massage it, palpating the skin within his hands as he searched for and prepared a vein…_

_Audrey lifted her hand to her mouth as she let out a gasp, hoping she hadn't been heard. But both men turned to see her and Audrey felt her vision tunnelling as she staggered backwards, out of sight around the corner she'd come from._

_“Miss Horne?” a voice called from behind her._

_Panicked, she spun around and faced Principal Wolczek, standing at the auditorium door. She had never been happier to see the head administrator of her alma mater in her entire life._

_It took two seconds for Audrey to will her feet to move. Her sweaty palms gripped the speech, crinkled in her fist. Her mind had totally blanked, her only focus being Wolczek's striped tie and the syncopated rhythm of her footsteps on the hallway floor as she crossed the space between them with increased speed, as the sound of a second set of footfalls sounded from down the hallway she'd been spying on moments before._

_She didn’t dare stop until she was through the door and in the wings, ensconced in the red theatrical drapes, the ones that reminded her too much of the terrible red room she'd visited in her dreams; this nightmare was real, though, and it wouldn't end with a kiss. Principal Wolczek walked ahead of her, leaving her in the heavy dark. Behind her, the locked doorknob jiggled. Audrey's heart thudded in her ears, her pulse racing. She shut her eyes._

_But she wasn't afraid. Far from it. The adrenaline in her veins exhilarated her. She leaned against the door, the only thing separating her from whatever it was the two FBI Agents outside were doing. The doorknob shook again. And then again._

_Audrey shut her eyes and pressed her knees together, biting her tongue against the tide of excitement that rose from her core and heated her cheeks, against all logic and reason. She hadn't felt this way since the first time John Justice Wheeler had slid his hand between the fabric of her panties and the skin of her lower stomach. And even that wasn't this good._

_She heard her name being called from the stage, and pushed herself away from the door with a shuddering sigh. The threat of danger had passed; her heart rate was slowing. She breathed in deeply and smoothed the sweat-dampened and badly wrinkled speech against her thigh, noting with no small measure of delight that every part of her was trembling._

_Audrey smiled at the darkness and went out to meet the audience._

^♢^


	4. Can You Hear My Heart Beating Like a Hammer?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Flashback to February 1990
> 
> Chapter title borrowed from Metric's "Help, I'm Alive"

^♢^

_Since Dougie Milford’s death the year before had put the kibosh on regularly scheduled weddings in the small town, the Catherine Martells and Dick Tremaynes of Twin Peaks—though, of course, not either of them specifically— had begun to complain about their fancy evening dress outfits getting dusty in the backs of their closets. Thus a lavish reception was meticulously organized to welcome the invited dignitaries from the Washington State Board of Education, guests from the high school, as well as the rest of the town's finest and brightest to the Timber Room of the Great Northern for a night of drinks, dinner, and dancing_

_Audrey wasn't obliged to attend and had debated making an appearance at all until the eleventh hour when she'd finally slipped into a fine dress of layered black chiffon that had been carefully packed in her luggage and was ready to go to Seattle with her up until the moment she decided to go down. She slinked down from her room at the far end of the hotel and made her way_ _to the Timber Room, slipping in through the main door and skirting around the perimeter of the room just before the dance was to begin._

_Without making a scene or calling attention to herself, she filled a tiny plate with hors d’oeuvres from the table at the back, and flirted her way to a glass of chardonnay at the bar. From the cool dark of the shadows beside a wide wooden support post, she scanned the room for the one person she wanted to see, the one person she had been afraid of meeting, the one person she wouldn't know what to say to if he were standing right in front of her._

_This was the role she had learned to play, the one that she was so good at filling: the observer, the watcher, sidelined and inert._

_But it didn’t last._

_“Audrey Horne?” a deep voice sounded._

_Startled, she turned to the source of the voice, and was surprised to find herself staring at Albert Rosenfield._

_Her breath siphoned from her lungs and her mouth hung agape; she felt her palms begin to sweat. It was a curious reaction, one she was unsure how to process, even though it was something that happened to her as often as the itching. There was only so much he could do in a room full of people, she reasoned, if his intentions were malicious. And though she had every reason to believe they might be, considering what she’d seen in the hallway earlier that day, she didn’t really think he was going to do anything. Still, her pulse quickened. She squeezed her fingers into her palms and tried to be nonchalant about determining his threat level._

_She bravely shoved her hand into the void between them. “I’m sorry, and you are—?”_

_The man didn’t quite sneer, but he didn’t seem pleased that she was wasting his time asking for an introduction. “Special Agent Rosenfield. Federal Bureau of Investigations,” he said, shaking her hand. “Listen, I just wanted to—”_

_“You’re friends with Agent Cooper, right?”_

_“Yeah, I—”_

_“Are you enjoying the event?”_

_“Miss Horne—”_

_She didn’t know why she was still talking. “I have it on good authority that the dance is going to be one for the books! You should definitely stick around—”_

_“Darn,” he quipped. “And I didn’t pack my tap shoes.”_

_He turned to look out over the sea of people around them before reaching forward again and grasping her by the upper arm and leading her away from the crowd despite her cry of protest. The sudden movement caused the plate she’d been holding in her hand to fall, shattering it and sending canapés sliding across the parquet in all directions. Nearby guests looked on in surprise; two black-vested staff members hurried in to clean it up._

_Audrey panicked, ignoring the mess she’d made and focusing on the grip of his hand around her upper arm. “Who the hell do you think you are?” she demanded._

_He stepped closer to her, close enough that Audrey could smell his aftershave, and she stopped cold. Even in heels, she only came eye-level to his Adam's apple. She stared down at the knot in his necktie and tried to remember how to breathe._

_“Look, I don’t know what you think you saw earlier today, but…”_

_“I didn’t see anything, Mr. Rosenfield—”_

_“_ _Agent_ _Rosenfield…”_

_She lifted her eyes to meet his. “It couldn't possibly make the slightest bit of difference to me.”_

_“Well, it does to me," he growled._

_She glared at him, and he at her, for a long and tense moment before Audrey noticed the reddish-purple stain of a bruise at the corner of his mouth, spreading down to the left hand side of his jaw. He noticed her noticing it, and turned his face the other way, but Audrey couldn’t tear her eyes away. Curiosity piqued, she felt herself drawn in; there was nothing for it._

_She found her voice. “Agent Rosenfield…what—?”_

_“Albert? What’s going on here?”_

_Audrey tore her eyes from Agent Rosenfield and focused all her attention on the FBI Agent striding across the wooden floor to their side. For the second time in thirty seconds, she felt her breath leave her body. Agent Cooper cut a handsome figure in his jet black suit—the same as he’d always worn, she realized, though she had forgotten just how wonderful he made it look. Her stomach fluttered as leftover tension was replaced by the daring pull of attraction._

_Albert dropped her arm and took a step back while Audrey lifted her hand to clutch her shoulder, rubbing the place where he’d been holding her. Cooper’s stare remained fixed on Albert, and the look he gave was absolutely withering._

_There was more going on here than met the eye._

_Albert shoved his hands into his pockets. “Miss Horne and I were just—”_

_At the mention of her name, Cooper glanced in her direction, forgetting for a moment his irritation with Albert. He hadn't noticed her yet; his eyes widened and he smiled suddenly, drinking her in from head to toe. Audrey blushed at the attention being paid to her, laser-focused and intense._

_“Hi,” she said._

_“I was hoping I’d see you here tonight but I didn’t expect…” he trailed off, his voice soft as he stepped forward and reaching out to take her hands in his. “What’s going on here? Is our Albert being his usual ornery self?”_

_Her attention remained divided between the FBI Agents, one on either side of her. She didn’t answer Cooper’s question; she wouldn't have known how to if she'd tried._

_Albert stepped forward. “Coop, I think—”_

_But Cooper brushed him aside, ignoring his friend’s words and his actions to focus entirely on Audrey. There was no strangeness, no distance, nothing that might have suggested a year had passed since their last meeting._

_“Would you care to dance?” he asked her, apropos of nothing._

_He still hadn’t let go of her hands; it was the longest physical contact she’d had with him since the night he whisked her away from One Eyed Jack’s, when she’d held him tightly in a fever dream and pretended she was anywhere but where she was, with his hands on her face, in her hair, against her back…_

_Audrey felt her stomach lurch into her throat. “I-I…I wasn’t…” she stuttered, the words unable to find purchase on her tongue or the back of her teeth._

_Cooper simply squeezed her fingers and beamed at her. “Come on,” he said, pulling her towards the dance floor as a swaying beat began calling other couples to their feet._

_Audrey allowed herself to be maneuvered to the middle of the dance floor, and even through the distraction of her suddenly very real Special Agent in front of her, she kept time with the music. He wrapped his arm around her and flexed his fingers against the fabric against her lower back, guiding her towards him and around the floor. She placed her hand on his arm, near his shoulder, just as she’d been taught in her social dance classes in school. It felt juvenile and exhilaratingly adult, all at once._

_She knew she was grinning like an idiot. But she couldn’t help herself. She was dizzy with anticipation, and had forgotten all pretense of fear and worry that had kept her hiding in her room all night._ Hiding from him _, she thought to herself._

What were you so afraid of?

_When they’d made a few cautious passes around the floor, Cooper grinned, looking over Audrey’s shoulder. “Albert sure has a bee in his bonnet, let me tell you,” he said._

_Audrey squeezed Cooper’s hand. “Does he?”_

_“What was all that about back there?”_

_She shrugged. “I-I honestly…I don’t know,” she replied, swallowing hard. “I think after seeing you both this afternoon—”_

_“Me and Albert?” Cooper asked, a confused and crooked smile on his face. “Did I see you this afternoon?” he asked._

_She stared at him. “You don’t remember?”_

_He shook his head. “I guess I was nervous about the award," he admitted. "I have no recollection of much of anything, to be quite honest with you, from the moment we arrived at the school until the ceremony was over and we arrived back here at the hotel."_

_Audrey furrowed her brow._ What are you playing at?  _she wondered. It had been him in the hallway that afternoon—hadn't it? There was no one else it could be. She would have known him anywhere._

Maybe you misread the whole thing,  _she chastised herself._ Maybe it was nothing at all. Totally innocent.

_“Audrey?” he asked._

_She shook her head. “Hm? Oh…I was…” she trailed off with a smile, brushing the unpleasant thoughts from her mind. “It’s nothing. I’m just...happy to see you here, that’s all.”_

_He just smiled at her and shook his head slowly, disbelieving. “Audrey Horne,” he said, her name rendered reverent by the airiness and wonder his voice imbued it with. He shook his head. “How have you been?”_

_“Fine,” she said. It wasn’t an entire lie. But it wasn’t a whole truth, either. She shrugged and readjusted her hand against his shoulder, folding her fingers around his upper arm as he drew her closer. “How have you been?”_

_“I’ve been fine,” he said. He spun her around and between two more dancing couples. “Better than fine, now that I’m here."_

_"Here in Twin Peaks, you mean?”_

_Cooper nodded and smiled as he danced her an inch closer to him. “Here in Twin Peaks, yes. Here in this room.” He lowered his voice, adding: “Here with you.”_

_Audrey blushed and turned her head, allowing herself a giddy grin. “What a thing to say…” she told him. “Tonight will be a nice send off, for me."_

_"Send off?"_

_"Well, I’m leaving tonight," she said. "Flying out to Seattle."_

_Cooper seemed shocked. "What's in Seattle?" he asked._

_Audrey shrugged. "It's what's_ _not_ _in Seattle that's more important," she said. "I've always wanted to get out of here, go to school. Start a life that's really mine, you know?"_

_He nodded. "I completely understand," he said, looking down at his feet momentarily before lifting his eyes again. "I suppose your beau—Mr Wheeler, was it?—lives there as well?"_

_Audrey shook her head, confused. "Oh, him?" she asked, wrinkling her nose as she laughed. "He hasn't been around since...well, gosh, since he left town the first time!" She shook her head, tossing her hair around her ears. ”No, no boyfriends for me."_

_Cooper smiled at her news. Audrey felt her heart beating in her throat._

_He spun her around the floor, her dress swishing delicately against her mid-calf as they turned and danced. She felt enchanted, all earlier unpleasantness forgotten entirely. She smiled and lowered her eyes. “Do you like my dress?” she asked._

_He paused. “Very much,” he admitted, his voice husky, wrenched from the base of his throat._

_She smiled. “I wasn’t going to come down to the banquet at all. But I was hoping to see you, and—” she cut herself off, chewing “I didn’t think you’d ever return to Twin Peaks. That day when I saw you last, when I was still in the hospital…I thought that would be the last time I saw you. Ever.”_

_Cooper squeezed her fingers in his and drew their hands to his chest. “I’m sorry for that. I shouldn’t have stayed away so long.”_

_Audrey knew her blush was ferocious; emboldened by his admission and riding the contact high of being so near to him, she continued to talk. “I was pretty mad at you for a while,” she said._

_“Oh?” he asked, amused._

_She nodded. “I thought the least you could have done was waited until I was off the IV drip before you took off,” she pouted. “I was on so many medications, I barely remember our last talk!”_

_But Cooper’s eyes had turned suddenly serious, and Audrey felt instant remorse at having taken him to task. She flexed her fingers into his shoulder._

_“Oh, Agent Cooper, I’m—I was just kidding.”_

_“No, Audrey, you’re right to say something. I know I wasn’t at my best,” he said. His voice changed, dropping any hint of levity or brightness and taking on an edge that she hadn’t heard from him before. He seemed lost in thought for a long moment, and their dancing slowed. Finally, he cleared his throat. “I’m not proud of it. Of any of it. And I apologize for the hurt I caused. But those were dark days. And there were many more to come.”_

_It was an ominous thing to say. She watched as shadows crossed his face, and she stiffened in his arms. His long fingers pressed intimately against the small of her back, his other hand gripping hers, vice-like, as he continued to lead her around the dance floor. Her heart began to thud, again, as memories of all the terrible and wonderful things she’d dreamed of flooded back to her._

_She hoped that—with all his rumoured special abilities, the spookiness and intuition that she’d heard so much about from others—that he couldn’t read minds as well. She blushed at the thought…_

_“Agent Cooper?”_

_He lifted his eyes to hers and, seeming to sense her discomfort, brightened considerably. “Audrey, didn’t we have our first dance right here in this room?”  
_

_She nodded. “Yes we did."_

_As the song died down and the couples around them began to jive instead of two-step, they stayed clasped in each other’s arms, swaying gently to a song only they could hear._

_“Audrey?”_

_“Yes?”_

_“I promise I won’t wait a year to talk to you again,” he told her. “You have my word on that.”_

_She nodded. “Okay, Agent Cooper.”_

_He flattened his palm against her back, drawing her barely an inch forward. It made all the difference. Audrey looked up at his face, seeing the same shadows she’d seen there earlier. They hinted at a depth she wasn’t entirely sure she was supposed to be seeing, and yet Agent Cooper—cool, composed, confident Cooper—would never allow himself to be seen in a light he didn’t intend. Or, at least, not that Audrey had ever seen._

_He blinked, his impossibly long lashes obscuring his eyes in what seemed like slow-motion to Audrey, before licking his lips and smiling. “Please, Audrey. Call me Dale."_

_If he hadn’t been holding her so tightly, she would have fallen over. Although, when she thought about it, it was precisely because he was holding her so tightly that her heart had begun to beat to the harried rhythms of the room she stood in._

_Before she knew what was happening, he had gently guided her back to the outskirts of the room again, and as the warmth of his hand left her back, she shivered._

_"Thank you for the dance," she told him, her voice a hair above a whisper. "You're as wonderful a dancer as ever."_

_“The honour was mine,” he said, his fingertips at her elbow. “It isn’t every day that I get to be with the most beautiful woman in the room.”_

_Audrey bowed her head and said nothing; she didn’t know what she_ _could_ _say._

_His name was called then from across the room, and as they both turned in the direction of the sound. Four members of the Board of Education were making their way over; their moment, such as it was, was ending._

_Cooper turned back to face her, desperation on his face. “When is your flight?"_

_"Midnight," she told him._

_He checked his watch. "If your dance card isn’t full, I may have to steal another before you leave," he said, taking a half step towards her as he took the fingers of her right hand in his. He brought her hand up to his to kiss her knuckles. “I wouldn't be able to stand it if I didn't get to say goodbye to you again. Properly this time."_

_When he let her hand drop again to her side, he smiled at her before turning and stepping away to mingle with the advancing group of educators. Audrey pressed her closed fist to the side of her overheating cheek and swiftly began recalculating all of her previously firm plans for her immediate future in order to factor Dale Cooper into each and every one of them._

_With icy precision, Albert—who apparently hadn’t moved from where they’d left him minutes earlier—stepped forward, invading her personal space in a way that angered her, but without supplanting the feelings of elation that Cooper had engendered in her._

_At the same moment, a waiter carrying a silver tray of sweets and cakes stopped by, proffering his wares. Audrey didn’t hesitate to pick up a small square of black forest cake, flashing a demure smile at the waiter as she did so. As he walked away, she lifted the long-stemmed maraschino cherry from its bed of whipped cream and popped it into her mouth, mashing the flesh between her teeth._

_She remembered the scene that afternoon, the intimate way these men had been entangled when they thought no one was looking. She figured there was much to say; she just wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it._

_“Did you want to say something to me?” she asked him._

_Albert glanced at the bright red cherry stem, perched between her front teeth, still glistening with sticky, sweetened syrup from the jar it had come from. Audrey pulled the entire thing into her mouth and blinked._

_“Listen to me, Cherry, and listen well,” Albert menaced, snapping her attention back to reality. “You need to stay the hell away from Dale Cooper, do you understand me?”_

_He didn’t wait for her answer before turning and stomping away out of the banquet hall._

_Audrey watched him with amazement. If she didn't know any better, she'd have assumed the two were involved, that this was bitter jealousy talking through the mouth of the choleric FBI Agent in front of her. But she’d also seen the way Cooper’s eyes had skimmed the bodice of her dress…_

_Audrey chewed the cherry stem for several minutes. Her hand tingled where she had made contact with Agent Cooper—Dale; lord, that would take some getting used to—and it would continue to feel strangely fibrous—flesh and tendons vibrating just below the surface of her skin—for the rest of the night. When he had clasped her in his arms and spun her around the room for the second and third and fourth time that night, she realized she had forgiven him completely for his departure the year before, for not contacting her in the ensuing months, for whatever she had witnessed in the hallway. None of it mattered. The seductive exhilaration of her body pressed to dangerously close to his—in spite of all the danger she felt was lurking, somewhere, just beneath everything around her in this godforsaken town, including the softly angled body of Dale Cooper—made her smile, and it was a smile she would carry with her all the way to the shore of the Pacific on her midnight flight._

_Wild horses and Albert Rosenfield's best intentions couldn’t have pulled her away if they’d tried._

^♢^


	5. Who Else is Gonna Put Up With Me This Way?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title borrowed from Lana Del Rey's "Off to the Races"

^♢^

Albert’s words hung suspended in front of Audrey as she walked along Sunset, trailing Dale by four car lengths the entire way. They were the only two people on the sidewalk. Cars whizzed past on the street, dizzying her with their speed and the obnoxious roar of their engines. Her focus lasered on keeping her heels from striking the sidewalk too hard and calling his attention to her. It was all she could do to keep her legs from giving out, knees weak from exhaustion and exhilaration.

_Be careful. Be careful._

He finally turned a corner, beneath a bright neon sign that advertised a bar called the Lucky Dragon, and Audrey pulled up, slowing her gait as she steeled herself for whatever confrontation might await her. He had never come away easily, not since she’d been part of this; if he put up a fight, she had to be ready, like every time before this. 

_Like every time to come,_ she thought. 

It was disheartening, the futility of it all. For a moment, Audrey hesitated. She looked down at her feet, her outfit, noting her general state of unreadiness. She had come from the office directly to the airport, and wasn’t wearing what she’d wear if she were out in the field; the three-inch high red heels on her feet were bad enough without the black pencil skirt severely limiting the range of motion of her legs should she need to give chase or, worse, run in search of her own safety. Her hands tingled and lost feeling at her side.

She shut her eyes and turned to the plate glass window beside her and examined her reflection, giving her a chance to relax, solidify her resolve. She hadn’t looked in a mirror since that morning, on the east coast, but as she took a step forward to fix the flyaway hair and the smudged shadow beneath her lower left eyelid, she still felt she looked okay. Pretty even. But she’d aged in the five years she’d been doing this job. Twenty-eight years old and with grey hair in her fringe, the first signs of crow’s feet gathering at the corners of her eyes and drawing down the corners of her lips. The face that stared back at her from the shop window looked not a little bit like her mother, and while it was not the first time Audrey had noticed that fact, it was the first time she didn’t mind the comparison.

Audrey stepped closer to the window and reached out her hand, touching her own face in the reflection, tracing her jawline, the wave in her hair, the outline of her lips. _Pretty_ , she thought. _But what will he see?_ Once upon a time, she’d have spent hours fussing over her reflection before going to see him. Tonight—like so many other nights just like it—it didn’t matter. 

And yet…

As the feeling returned to her fingertips, she smoothed her hands over the front of the skirt and secured her service revolver at her side. Tucking her chin-length hair back behind her ears, she shrugged her shoulders within her blazer, rolling her neck twice before continuing on her path.

As she neared the corner, the ruddy glow of the street lights began to dim, leaving her barely enough light to see by but just enough to illuminate the cockroaches skittering around on the sidewalk next to a bag of garbage sitting half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter, its contents spilling over the sidewalk.

It only took a moment’s distraction. Audrey made a face, her displeasure and disgust coming out in a low groan as she tried to avoid stepping on anything, insect or otherwise, that lay in her path. Eyes cast down, she rounded the corner and plunged into the virtual darkness of the cross-street, and she was not two steps beyond the sharp corner when she was grabbed, spun around, and pinned against the brick wall face-first, her arm twisted roughly behind her. 

He pressed the strength of his forearm across her shoulder blades. “Who are you?” he menaced.

Audrey’s shock made speech an impossibility for a long moment; finally, she sputtered: “No one.”  


“You’re a liar,” he said, twisting her arm a little more. 

She choked out a begging cry, hating the sound of it. “Ow…stop it, please.” 

He pressed his body against hers from behind, his right thigh planted firmly between hers. “You’ve been following me since I left my motel,” he said, pressing his lips to the cup of her ear. “I wanna know why.”

Audrey shut her eyes and swallowed. “I-I’m an old friend.”

He pulled away but slightly; she felt his stubble against her skin, his breath hot on her neck, for a long moment before he pulled his arm away and ran his hand around her side. She gasped and shut her eyes tight as he scooped beneath her breast and along the underwire support of her brassiere, down the front of her ribcage, along her hip; he was looking for a weapon, and it didn’t take long before he found it, removing the handgun from its holster with ease. 

His grip on her wrist tightened once again as the weight of her sidearm disappeared, and her heart sank. But he didn’t move, the heat of him hard against her back, covering her in the close dark. She could smell him, familiar but foreign; with the swell of her backside pressed against the zipper fly of his trousers, his threatening nearness excited her more than she could have anticipated.

It seemed to affect him as much as her. She felt him pressing back, his hips angling forward, his knee pushing her legs further apart, his breath heavy as he lowered his face to the juncture of her neck and shoulder. The hand with the gun snaked around her waist; she felt the cold barrel pressed against her lower belly, where her shirt had ridden up and exposed her skin to the night air. It took her breath away.

“I don’t have any friends,” he said, his lips moving against the skin on her neck as, once again, he twisted her arm, until Audrey was certain it would snap. 

She cried out once more. “Audrey!” she shouted. “I’m Audrey. My name is Audrey.”

At the mention of her name, mercifully, he loosened his grip on her wrist, but only slightly. 

“Audrey,” he repeated before letting her hand fall, and she breathed a sigh of relief as the pain in her hand subsided. He took a step back, and then another, and Audrey shut her eyes and released a sigh. He repeated her name several times, quietly under his breath, before making his first demand.

“Turn around.”

But she didn’t dare move. For several long seconds, Audrey stayed perfectly still, aside from the trembling. He repeated his demand. She hesitated, but eventually she acquiesced, twisting her shoes into the grit of the sidewalk as she rotated her body to face him.

In the dark, she couldn’t make out his features, but she knew from his voice, his height, the space his body took up as he stood in front of her, that it was him. Not that she had any doubt. She would have known him anywhere.

But at the same time it wasn’t _him_ at all. Her hand made a fist at her side and she took a shuddering breath in before lifting herself up to her full height, stacking her vertebrae until she met his eyes.

Dale continued to roll her name around in his mouth again and again for several seconds before he finally he took a step back to look at her more clearly. “You’re not from here,” he said, in a voice far deeper and tired than the one she remembered. 

“I’m not?” she asked.

She watched him watch her, his eyes deeply shadowed. He looked tired, haggard. “Don’t play games with me.”

“I-I’m not,” she said, rubbing her cheek and noticing with some dismay that the seam along the side of her skirt had torn. The frayed ends of the stitching that had come loose blew against the side of her knee, feeling like bugs crawling on her skin. She wasn’t entirely certain it wasn’t actually bugs, recalling the tiny cockroaches at the corner. But she kept her cool, focusing on her breathing and the death-cold stare he levelled at her from a distance that didn’t exceed the reach of his arms.

“Where are you from?”

“I think you know already,” she told him.

He paused; in the half-light, she saw the wet tip of his tongue as he licked his lips. 

“Philadelphia,” he said, dragging the word from his own mouth as if it were a piece of saltwater taffy and had appeared to him out of thin air. He lifted his eyes, searching for its place of origin. Audrey almost believed it for a moment, and looked up herself; she only saw the copper glow of the streetlights reflected off the overcast sky above. No words, no nothing. 

He lowered his eyes until they were locked with hers. “But that’s not where you’re actually from, is it?”

She swallowed. Something about his voice had changed, tilted, until she wasn’t sure what his motives were anymore. He held her gun still in his hand, but it was a loose grip, his wrist extended, his finger nowhere near the trigger.

“And where do you suppose that is, then?” Audrey asked.

He cocked his head to the side; she couldn’t see his eyes clearly enough, but if she knew him—and she did—she knew he was squinting at her, sizing her up, applying the logician’s rationality and the seer’s intuition to what she presented. 

_Dig deep, Dale_ , she thought. 

“I think I knew an Audrey once.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “You did?” 

Dale nodded. “She came from the trees,” he droned, long and languid. “Dark hair. Dark spot beside her eye.” He took a step closer to her. “Dark deeds in dark rooms…”

Audrey smiled as her heart skipped three or four or ten beats, she couldn’t be sure. “Is that so?”

He looked down at his hands and for a moment was silent. “I think I saved her life once.”

“Yes,” Audrey whispered, feeling her pulse racing. Her cheek burned, from the pain of kissing the bricks as well as from hot blood just beneath the surface. She fingered the ring once again, rubbing it between the tips of her ice cold fingertips. “More than once. You rescued her from a horrible place. A place where they would have killed her if you hadn’t shown up. And from a madman intent on murder. And from a life of mediocrity. From herself.” She swallowed thickly. “You saved her in so many ways…”

He was standing much closer now, close enough to reach his hand out and take her wrist within it. She gasped, feeling him circle his fingers, pressing the pads into her pulse point. Her defensive instincts having failed her, she felt her resolve sink; she worried this was it, that this would be the end of it all, because being held by Dale Cooper was all it took to send her world spinning and he knew it.

“Your heartbeat...” he stated, his voice barely above a whisper.

Audrey struggled to retain her balance. “Mm-hmm?”

He flicked his eyes briefly toward the neon sign and back down to meet hers once again. With his hand still clasped around her wrist, his fingertips pressed to the place where her heartbeat lived and danced and died beneath his touch, he pulled her closer, and she gasped at the shock of it, feeling it ripple out to her core and back again. He dropped her hand, the sudden loss of contact causing Audrey to gasp again, louder this time, before his hand found its way to her face. He cupped her jaw, ran his thumb along her cheekbone, and touched a fingertip to the inkblack spot beside her eye. 

"Pretty," he whispered. 

She could swear she heard him smile.

“Audrey?" 

Her eyelids fluttered closed and she leaned into Dale's hand as long fingers found the nape of her neck, tangled themselves in her hair. Audrey puddled. "Mm hm?" she asked.

His response was low, quiet, rumbling and ripped from his sternum. She thought if she looked hard enough, she'd see the vibrations in the air between them.

"Audrey..." he repeated in wonder. "Can I buy you a drink?”

^♢^


	6. Everything Turns Cold and Hard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title borrowed from Fiona Bevan's "Gold"

^♢^

_“I thought you’d never ask,” Audrey beamed at him, sliding slowly off her barstool, one foot tipped down, reaching for the floor until her toe made contact with the tiles. She straightened her plaid skirt and smiled up at him, while he extended his arm, placing his hand in the small of her back as he guided her between the tables in the dimly-lit hotel lounge._

_They settled on a booth in the back, beneath a framed collage made of beer coasters and an antique mirrored sign advertising some type of Irish stout Audrey had never heard of before. She slid onto the bench seat, slipping her arms out of her thin cardigan and setting it beside her; Cooper waited until she was settled before sliding in across from her. She felt his foot beside hers beneath the table top and pressed the side of her shoe to his, delighting in the sensation._

_Audrey picked up the faux-leather drink menu from its holder at the end of the table nearest the wall. “I don’t know what to order.”_

_“It’s your birthday,” he replied. “Order whatever you’d like.”_

_She flipped through the menu, but the mess of hard-to-pronounce names and ingredients made her head spin. “They should just describe what it tastes like,” she scowled as she scanned her fingertip down the page. “Instead of just listing what’s in it. Tell me if it’s sweet or sour or fizzy or bitter…that’s the important stuff.”_

_He grinned. “That’s a good idea.”_

_She looked up at him from beneath the fringe of her eyelashes. “It is?” she asked, watching as he nodded and folded his hands on the table in front of him. Pleased with herself, she looked back to the menu. “What do you usually order?”_

_“I don’t. But tonight I’m willing to make an exception,” he said, adding: “The birthday girl should never drink alone.”_

_She narrowed her eyes in concentration before giving up and hazarding a smile. “Tell you what," she said, closing the book and returning it to the holder. "How about you pick my drink, and I’ll pick yours.”_

_Dale thought about it for a moment before grinning. “Okay,” he said._

_Audrey shifted in her seat, the vinyl bench squeaking beneath her. She crossed her legs, forgetting how close his lower limbs were to hers and nudging him in the process. He shocked, as if electrocuted, and sat up straighter in his own seat; but didn’t move his legs as her calf settled next to his knee._

_She shivered; he noticed. “Are you cold?”_

_Audrey didn’t want to tell him it wasn’t temperature-related. “I’m always cold these days,” she lied, looking down at her hands before lifting them up and reaching across the table. "See?"_

_Dale's gentle grasp of her admittedly cold fingertips shocked her the way the touch of her leg had shocked him. His hands were warm, soft. Long fingers, a wide palm; his hand dwarfed hers._

_Concern filled his face as he reached for her other hand, rubbing his thumb over her knuckles in an attempt to warm them which ultimately failed because the longer he held her hands the more Audrey felt her blood leaving her extremities for more important locales within her body. She squeezed his fingertips and smiled, pushing through the blush that crept into her cheeks as she pulled her hands out of his._

_“I’m glad you called me, told me you were going to be in town,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.”_

_“You have?”_

_He nodded, but his attention was diverted by a server arriving at their table with new coasters. “What can I get for you?” she asked as she pulled out a notepad from her apron._

_Dale smiled across the table at Audrey. “The lady will have a Singapore sling,” he said._

_Audrey liked the sound of that very much. “He’ll have an Old Fashioned,” she replied._

_“Old Fashioned?” he said with a grin as the server left again. “I haven’t had one of those in a very long time.”_

_“Did I pick right then?”_

_He nodded. “Aces.”_

_She leaned back and tapped her fingers on the table top. “What’s a Singapore sling?”_

_His face screwed up and for a moment he was stumped. Then he laughed. “I honestly don’t know!” he admitted._

_She laughed. “Well, I’ve always said I’ll try anything once.”_

_They lapsed into a comfortable silence that whispered of an easy friendship, not of the reunion that was such a long-time coming—nearly four years of letters and phone calls and hasty in-person meetings here and there. It felt unnecessary to overdo it; they were, after all, both adults. So while she did her level best to keep her feet from tapping holes through the floor in excitement, she folded her hands on top of one another._

_“How long has it been since we saw each other last?” she asked._

_Dale grew thoughtful. “A year and a half, I think. I was in Seattle. Behavioural psychology conference at the University of Washington.” He smiled and nodded. “We met for lunch at a restaurant overlooking Elliot Bay. We talked about your interest in pursuing a career in law enforcement.” He looked down at his hands before continuing. “You had egg salad on rye, I had a BLT. Sub par coffee. Blueberry pie for dessert.”_

_Audrey was impressed with his recall until she remembered that good food was his wheelhouse and this is what he did. “Not as good as Norma’s pie,” she grinned._

_He nodded and let out a small chuckle. “Well that goes without saying.”_

_She bounced her foot in the air under the table, and her leg brushed up against his. For a moment she froze, but the moment he let his knee rest against hers, widening his stance beneath the cover of the tabletop, Audrey couldn’t help but relax into him._

_“Do you know how old I am today?”_

_He nodded, swallowed. “Twenty three.”_

_“Mm-hmm,” she replied, secretly pleased that he’d been keeping track. “You know why I flew out here, huh?”_

_His eyes wandered from hers down the length of her arm, across the expanse of her exposed décolletage—lingering there just long enough for her to notice and blush—before returning to her face. He watched her mouth, and she chewed her lip._

_“Yes, I think I do.”_

_She lowered her eyes. “I have a meeting with someone named Cole _—I think he said he's the Bureau Chief or something? _—anyway, I meet with him__  tomorrow. About my application. He hinted that with my background, my college grades, and I guess my connection to you and what happened five years ago—” _

_The waiter brought out their drinks then, placing a frothy pink concoction in front of her, and a stout tumbler in front of him. She lifted her glass and examined it. It smelled like Hawaii and looked like a sunset, but apart from that she had no idea what it contained._

_He raised his glass and tipped it forward to touch the rim of hers. “Happy birthday, Audrey Horne, the newest member of the Gordon Cole’s Blue Roses,” he said. “You’re going to make a great addition to our team.”_

_Audrey's mouth dropped open and, as it did, her hand tipped and a shock of ice cold pink liquid spilled over her fingers. She righted the hurricane glass, embarrassing with a flush across her exposed skin. Dale reached for a napkin and helped her to clean up, a knowing smirk on his face._

_She mindlessly wiped sticky juice from her fingertips. “You knew?”_

_“Of course I did,” Dale said as he mopped up the pineapple-scented beverage from the table top. “Who do you think requested you?”_

_She blushed, then she smiled, and then she reached for the little plastic sword still sticking out of the top of her drink, impaling a golden wedge of pineapple. “Thank you,” was all she could think of to say._

_Audrey lifted the sword and examined the fruit before descending on the pineapple, chewing it thoughtfully and slowly, enjoying every delightful squish and spray of juice as it washed over tongue. His eyes were on her, not moving as his hand slowed and the circles he made with the uselessly soaked napkins got lazier and lazier until eventually he left the sopping pink pile where it was and lifted his own glass, pulling back, hard, on the liquid within. The ice cubes clinked against one another and the inside of the glass. His hand shook as he put the nearly empty drink back down on the table._  

_Audrey took a sip from her half empty glass, and then another. Her blush had never quite disappeared; she felt the flushing heat of it in her cheeks and on her temples and splayed intimately across the tops of her breasts, wondering how much of it was from embarrassment and how much was from the fact that she hadn't eaten since lunch time and the alcohol was going straight to her head._

_But another possibility existed._

_Watching him watching her, so intently, she felt the blush spreading, sinking lower, coiling in her lower stomach and displacing her inner organs before settling between her legs, molten and heavy, a physical presence she couldn’t dislodge in a booth in a bar on her birthday. She listened to the instinct that told her to sit up straighter, to angle her pelvis and grind it into the seat below her to stifle the throb that had started to mount, but the slightest movement nearly sent her sputtering to the ground; she thought she might explode._

_Her voice came out wispy and breathless on account._

_“Do you remember what I told you that one time?” she said, clearing her throat before continuing. “The day I thought you were leaving? In your room at my father's hotel?"_

_He nodded, barely. She cast her eyes down at the tabletop, wondering where she was getting the chutzpah for this._

_“Well…,” she started, faltering a bit before she was able to continue. “Well, Agent Cooper _—"__

_"Dale," he corrected, choking on his own voice as it left his throat._

_She nodded and grinned, still chewing on the corner of her lower lip. "Well..._ Dale _...I grew up didn't I? Just like I said I would. And I'm here on my own. I’m staying at this hotel, actually, for the next few days until my apartment is ready…but then you probably already knew that, too."_

_He caught every last soft innuendo lobbed his way; his eyes grew soft and dark, their lids heavy as he processed what she was saying. “Mm-hmm,” was his only reply._

_She took another sip from her glass._ Liquid courage _, she'd heard her uncle had call it once, and she hadn't known what he meant by that. She knew what it meant now though. The cold sweetness filled her veins, pushed the blood where it was most needed and made her head feel light, like it was a helium balloon and her neck was the string. Setting the glass back on the table, she licked the tips of her fingers, wet again with Singapore sling._

_“Would you like to see my room?”_

_She thought he had made a noise at the back of his throat, but she couldn't be sure. All she knew was that he had lifted his glass to his lips, and the last of the amber liquid had tipped back and slid over his tongue. She watched as the pale line of his throat bobbed when he swallowed, and she closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to think about the marks she wanted to leave on his skin._

_He set the heavy glass back down, and though the tremble in his hand matched the tremble in hers, his eyes were steady. She thought she knew what his answer would be, and steeled herself for disappointment as she’d done so many times in the past._

_Audrey was happy to be surprised, and as FBI Special Agent_ _Dale Cooper smiled and lifted his eyes to hers, she was._

_He simply grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”_

^♢^


	7. I'm Not Myself Lately I'm Foolish, I Don't Do This

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title taken from Beyonce's "Crazy in Love"

^♢^

Audrey ordered three drinks—two for herself, one for him; she downed one of her own at the bar, letting it soothe the frayed nerves that caused the tremors in her hand to vibrate the shot glass even as she drank from it. Tequila, the good stuff; chilled and smooth, it slid down her throat like gold and she sighed as she felt the warmth of it ripple out through her veins. 

_Liquid courage_ , she remembered. _For dark deeds in dark rooms_ …

She set the empty glass down on the counter, then made her way back to the booth where Dale sat shrouded in shadows cast by red lanterns overhead. They shone through the ornately carved Chinese screens that served as walls and kept the tables and booths separate and private while evoking the slightly racist cast of a Far East opium den. The bar was mostly empty; it was, after all, a Sunday night. 

She handed him the drink in her right hand—Kentucky bourbon on the rocks—while reserving the left hand drink for herself. He took the glass from her and thanked her before allowing his first, tentative sip to pass his lips; his approval was evident, and he took a second pull.

_No turning back now,_ she thought.

“I guess I owe you one,” he said as he set the tumblr down.

“No need,” she replied, taking a sip from her glass and feeling the burn of it as it coursed down her throat. She was not a fan of bourbon. 

“Well. My behaviour on the sidewalk out there was…less than genteel.” 

“I _was_ following you.”

“Yes, you were,” he said, eyeing her. “Why _were_ you following me?”

“I’ve been looking for you,” she told him. “I was worried. We all were. So I came here to find you.”

He lifted his glass and tipped it against his lips. She watched the liquid pour into his mouth, watched him swallow. He hadn’t shaved—she had felt it on his cheek outside but even in the dim crimson glow of those lanterns, she could see the faint stain of a five-o’clock shadow in the hollows of his cheeks and along his jaw. 

“Didn’t I tell you where I was going?” he asked.

Audrey chewed the inside of her cheek. Each time was the same but always slightly off, in one way or another—a hardness in his eyes, an edge to his words and his voice; quick to anger one time and weeping the next—and it took the mind of a master improviser to make the work flawless that needed to be done. Now was no different. 

_He’s shifted_ , she thought _, but he doesn’t remember getting here. This is new. He usually remembers until he goes back..._

She made a mental note about what to write in her field notes once this was all over; Albert and his team were going to have a lot to pore over when they got home.

“No, you didn’t tell me,” she admitted. “We were supposed to go for supper, remember? But I had to finish some paperwork. You got impatient, and then you left…”

Dale looked around the bar. “We’re in Los Angeles?” he asked.

Audrey nodded. “That’s right.”

His eyes widened. “I left you at your office…in _Philadelphia_ …and flew to _Los Angeles_?”

She nodded again. “Yes, you did.”

He rolled his neck around on his shoulders and let out a gentle laugh. “And you say we’re friends?” he chastened. “What kind of friend am I that I’d bail on a dinner date with you to the tune of three thousand miles?”

Audrey felt her throat close up and she swallowed around the stone of tears uncried. Dislodging it with a sharp cough, she shook her head and smiled instead. 

“You’re not well, Dale” she told him, her voice cracking and filling with emotion anyway. She swallowed again, harder this time, and blinked twice. _Stop it_ , she warned herself. _There’s time for that later. Focus._ “Sometimes you do things that we don’t understand. That _you_ don’t even understand. But it’s okay. And we're still friends.”

_More than friends_ , she thought as she averted her gaze.   


He eyed her with curiosity, a guarded but friendly suspicion. It had been years since he’d looked at her that way, and she felt like she was eighteen again. Stymied and suddenly self-conscious, she let her hand fall to her thigh, where she played with the loose threads along the ripped seam of her skirt. 

“I’m sorry about that,” he said.

Audrey looked up to see him looking down, at the tear, an unreadable expression on his face.

“My own fault,” she said, though she wasn’t entirely sure why she said it at all. It was a lie and she knew it; he knew it too. But it was the kind of lie she told herself all the time, the kind that protected the honour of another, prevented them from harm. She hated that it came so naturally, still, after all these years.

Dale ghosted his hand down from the tabletop to land next to the torn fabric and rolled a piece of thread between his fingers. Audrey’s breath caught in her throat as the tip of his finger brushed her thigh, exposed beneath the frayed triangle of the ruined seam. She closed her eyes. The momentary flash of contact sent shivering waves of goosebumps up and down her leg. He didn’t move his hand for a long moment. She wondered if he had felt it too. 

But of course he did; he had to have.

Audrey lifted her own hand and brought her glass to her lips, not caring that it was Woodford Reserve she was using as a chaser for whatever this was instead of Don Julio. It burned harsh and smoky, sparks crackling down her throat. Yet she took another sip before the first had even finished, chasing the chaser, searing the exposed channels within her esophagus that threatened to bleed her dry with every passing moment he wasn't hers.

He eyed her, observing her while he tipped his own glass to one side and then the other, balancing it between his fingers on the lower edge of the heavy glass base. “You don’t like bourbon,” he said.

She set her glass back down. “It’s a taste I haven’t acquired yet.”

“Then why’d you order it?”

It was a challenge, direct and unflinching, made with clear eyes that stared firm into her own, yielding nothing. Who was she talking to now?

Audrey looked down into the glass. “You like it so much. I guess I just want to taste what you taste. 

His left eye twitched as he looked back inside his own glass. “That’s virtually impossible. You can never taste what I taste.”

“Why not?”

Dale didn’t immediately respond; he kept tipping his glass back and forth on the base, attempting to balance it on the bottom rim. “Did you know that the temperature inside your mouth isn’t quite the same as your body temperature?”

Audrey shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”

Dale lifted the glass to his lips again. The cubes clinked around against one another as he drank, as if spilling the secret to their involvement with the bourbon before he could get a chance to tell it himself. He put the glass back down and stared at it. “Body temperature is roughly ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit, or thirty-seven degrees Celsius. The mouth, by virtue of being closer to the outside of the body, and because it opens and releases its heat when a person talks or eats, is always slightly colder, maybe by as much as a few degrees in fact.”

“Fascinating,” Audrey admitted.

He continued to play with his glass. “When you introduce something cold into your mouth, that substance immediately lowers the temperature inside even further. The body reacts by dilating the lingual artery and the blood vessels around it, sending warm blood to the mouth and the tongue to even out that temperature differential.” His voice was dreamlike, lazy; the words fell from his lips to the table, and he made no effort to catch them. He sounded exhausted. “Of course enzymes present in our saliva have already started breaking down the food or drink, releasing compounds that contribute to our sense of taste. Our sense of smell is vital at this point too, probably more so than the tastebuds on our tongue. But the temperature of your mouth at the start of that process is as important as the temperature of the liquid. It’s all crucial to the flavours we perceive.”

He lifted his eyes then to look at her. “My mouth is different than your mouth,” he said, focusing on her lips, which parted under his gaze. “The temperature, the surface area, the bacteria and enzymatic response—all different, all affecting the taste.”

Thoughts about the temperature and surface area of the interior of Dale’s mouth made Audrey’s head spin. She pressed her palms into the bench seat to steady herself. “So that’s why I’ll never know what bourbon tastes like to you?”

He nodded. “That’s right.”

“I-Is that why you drink your bourbon over ice?”

“It’s how Kentuckians drink it,” he said as a momentary flash of confusion filtered across his face. “I don’t know how I know that.”

_Because we spent three weeks in Kentucky four years ago,_ she wanted to say. _That’s where you switched from Old Fashioneds to drinking the stuff straight. You fell in love with it there. You brought home a bottle for everyone in the office. Two for Albert._

But she didn’t say that. She simply brought the glass up to her lips and took another pull of the liquid, smaller this time. As she rolled the chilled bourbon around on her tongue, she imagined the blood vessels dilating, warming things back up again, flooding her mouth with enzymes that released aromatics up and out to bounce around against the backs of her teeth or into her nasal cavity, activating her olfactory nerve, firing messages deep into her limbic system. She thought she tasted cinnamon, nutmeg, and it reminded her of late August. She shivered. It was the first time the burn of the alcohol didn’t bother her so much as she swallowed the mouthful, with her eyes closed tight. She wondered if he noted the spices, or if he tasted something entirely different.

She wanted to invade his mouth and see. But she couldn't do that. So she squeezed the bench seat and thought about icebergs instead.

“Do you know someone named Albert?” Dale asked.

Audrey looked over at him and saw that his drink was gone; he was drawling, slurring his words. She set her glass down and pushed it away. _Time to dance,_ she thought to herself.  

“I do know Albert, yes."

He leaned forward a bit, resting his chin in his hand. “Where...do you know him f-f-from?”

“Philadelphia,” she answered.

“No,” he replied. “He’s…f-f-from the FBI. That m-m-means...you’re from the FBI.”

“That’s right, Dale. I work for the FBI.”

“I think…I w-w-was FBI once.”

“Yes, you were,” Audrey said. “You still _are_ , in fact. Best and brightest.”

He looked off into the distance, his face lit in the red glow from above the table and by the warmth of the candle in the middle of it below him. “You’re not f-f-from Ph-h-hiladelphia.”

She pushed her drink aside and gathered her blazer in her arms from the bench beside her. “Not originally,” she said.

He looked at her. “You’re…f-f-from Twi-i-in Peaks.”

She nodded, sliding her arms into the jacket. “Yes, I am.”

Dale quizzed her with his eyes and then reached for her hand, lazily dropping his palm atop hers, covering it completely, hiding it from view. Audrey  stopped and relished the sensation of skin-on-skin contact with this man who meant so much to her. 

“Audrey, w-w-what did you…put in m-m-my drink?”

Audrey cocked her head to the side and slid closer to him on the semi-circular bench. She lowered her voice and pulled her hand out from beneath his to rest it on top. “It’s a compound synthesized in our labs by our people, by your friends, Sam and Albert and the rest,” she said. “It’s tasteless. Odourless. The effects are fast-acting but don’t last as long as some other tranquilizers, and with no lingering after effects,” she told him, hoping she sounded reassuring. She stroked her index finger over his knuckles. “You’ll be dizzy and you’ll feel weak and highly suggestible but at the measured dose I gave you those will be the worst symptoms.”

Dale’s head dipped forward a bit; to any outside observer, he would appear to have simply imbibed too much too quickly. He looked down at her hand, at the ring on her finger and the rash she’d caused by twirling it around and around for so long. Audrey slid closer to him until they were side by side, touching shoulders and elbows and hips and thighs and knees; she reached toward him and turned his body towards hers, then helped him to steady his head on his neck, placing one hand on either side of his face. He blinked at her, struggling to keep his eyes in focus.

“When?” he asked.

She smiled at him. “At the bar. When I ordered the drinks.”

Resigned realization crossed his face. “That’s w-w-why you wouldn’t let m-m-me pay.”

Audrey nodded, soothing her thumb across his cheekbone. She brushed his hair back from his forehead, smoothing the worried wrinkles along his brow. She felt like crying. “Dale, listen to me. I’m here to help you. I’m here to take you _home_.”

He lifted his lazy eyes to meet hers. “Home?” he whispered.

She saw tears gathering on his lashes, and when he nodded, they spilled, one from each eye. It was Audrey's undoing; her heart shattered. She leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his cheek, and then another, lingering next to his skin, within his scent, as she did.

“That’s right,” she said, weariness lacing her voice. “We’re going home.”

He had at least sixty pounds of taut muscle on her, easily, and yet she moved him as if he were a featherweight. He leaned against her for support, gripping her hand in his, as they made their way out into the suddenly chilled but humid night and back along Sunset Boulevard towards the car.

^♢^


	8. He's Good and He's Bad and He's All That I've Got

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title borrowed from The Civil Wars' "Devil's Backbone"
> 
> Thanks to TipDorrit and my handsome hubby (who doesn't have an AO3 account...yet) for helping me specifically with this chapter!

^♢^

_It was there, in a Philadelphia hotel room on her twenty-third birthday, that Audrey Horne realized there was something wrong with Dale Cooper._

_That night, as Audrey led Dale out of the bar and towards the elevator bank across the lobby behind a veil of expectation, she thought she knew what she was doing. She certainly had some right to claim skill in the the sexual arena; she was no novice. Here, on the other end of her self-styled coming-of-age story—the one she’d written but which had been bookended by him, that began with his arrival in her town and which now seemed to be ending with his hand at her elbow, his finger tracing its way up and down her radial and ulnar arteries—on the other end of that, the truth was that she liked what her body was capable of. She liked the way it made men, and women, react; she liked the way it moved, the way it played. She liked the way it felt, beneath her own hands or the hands of a partner. She would not feel ashamed of it: she liked sex. She enjoyed how it felt, physically and emotionally and spiritually, how it made her tremble and burn, how she could forget who she was and give herself over to the nerve endings beneath her skin._

_Most of all, she liked the helplessness of orgasm. There was danger in letting herself go into a state of total vulnerability beneath the body of a man, in allowing herself to come apart because the force in his hands made it happen, in not knowing what he was capable of but knowing it was more than what she could fight off. She craved it; she thrilled herself to the brink even thinking about it._

_Audrey wanted to be vulnerable. And she wanted Dale to put her there._

_And on that night—the night of her birthday—it seemed very likely that she would get her wish._

_In hindsight, Audrey knew that all the signs were there. The upstanding federal law enforcement agent that she’d fallen in love with at first sight five years earlier over breakfast at her father’s hotel, with eyes like the forest and hair the colour of midnight, was not the kind of man to lift her in his arms, push her skirt over her hips, and fuck her against the wall of her hotel room. And yet that is exactly what had happened, and Audrey had been too overcome with her own school girl fantasies and decidedly grown up desires to notice, or care, that her Special Agent was acting, intoxicatingly, against type._

_Because even in those dreams—the ones she’d been having, with alarming regularity, for five years—he was dark and full of danger, but he was still recognizable; he was still hers, somehow. This man, the one who claimed her so completely in the confines of room two-twenty-two, overlooking the Delaware River, a stone’s throw from the FBI’s Philadelphia Field Office, was so different as to be an entirely different person. And there wasn’t just one thing that led her to that conclusion but several._

_It was the way he’d stood next to her in the elevator, leaning back against the chair rail, arms akimbo with his ankles crossed below, his little finger grazing hers until she wasn’t sure if her stomach was bottoming out because of the admittedly minimal contact or the movement of the lift as it came to a stop on her floor. It was how he had followed a half step behind her, near enough for her to feel him; the way his body had muffled the sound in her right ear, without him touching her at all. Not until they reached the door to her room, anyway, which is when he’d bent his head and pressed a kiss to the side of her neck that gave her shivering goosebumps and caused her to drop the key. Twice._

_It was the way he’d steadied her hand on the knob as she finally slid the key into the lock, or the way he’d pushed the door open. It was how he didn’t let her turn on the light but instead had_ shushed _the door closed with his toe and hauled her against him, crushing his mouth against hers in the close dark._

_It was the way he’d kept his eyes on her, watching her sink to her knees in front of him to pull down the zipper fly of his suit trousers, taking the length of him first in her hand and then between her lips, with no surprise on his face, knowing exactly how to push her hair back behind her ears and how to cup her cheek without insisting, letting her control the pace, like he'd done this a million times before. It was because he’d known the precise way to curl his fingers—two, at first, and then three—within her to bring her just to the brink of orgasm before sliding his tongue over her clitoris, teasing between the two, his other hand holding her hip hard and fast to the mattress until she couldn't move and tears streamed from her eyes and she was begging to gods she didn’t believe in to let her come._

_It was the way he had leaned over her while her body quaked and the last vestiges of her shuddering orgasm had drifted across her eyes; it was the way he’d told her, in no uncertain terms, that he was going to have her the way he wanted to have her; it was the way he’d picked her up out of bed and stood her up against the wall and done exactly what he wanted, fucking her hard, with her legs hooked around his hips and his hips pumping up and into her so deeply she felt it everywhere._

_But it was also the way he’d placed a hand on her throat, his thumb pressing against the delicate skin and the cartilage beneath it; his large hands, his long fingers, wrapping around the sides of her neck, pushing against her trachea, squeezing off her blood supply, until she couldn’t breathe and felt the room begin to fuzz at the edges and she grew lightheaded. It was because when she came, again—brilliantly and fast and painfully and with a sputtering cry from her strangled throat—she did so precisely because he’d nearly choked the life from her._

_Vulnerability. Helplessness. Danger. Borne out of her abduction and confinement at One Eyed Jack’s, maybe, when she’d been made to want the heroin they’d put in her veins; maybe that desire never left her. Maybe she would always want it, to be tied to a bed and fed the most beautiful sensations, weak, defenceless, unprotected, and with the promise that at the end of it all, when she came back to earth, it would be his face that she’d see, just as it had been all those years ago._

_Audrey’s heart slammed in her chest in remembrance of the moment as much as it had in the moment itself._

_She had washed their indiscretion down the drain with cheap hotel toiletries, but when she had stepped out of the shower and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror—in a clear spot she’d wiped clean with her hand—she realized that there were some stains she wasn’t going to be able to scrub away so easily. The dark smudge of a hickey on the side of her neck, beneath the red striations left by his hands on her throat; the still-visible fingerprints on her winter-pale hips; a purplish mark inside her thigh. And there were hurts she couldn’t see but which lived within her. It hurt to stand there, but she relished the pain, knowing it had come from his hands and his body on her, thrusting against her, slamming into her._

_None of this was what she had imagined for their first time together, but that didn’t matter anymore. The clear animal need he had for her made her knees weak and tied exquisite and intricate knots into her stomach. She smiled in spite of herself, giddy with excitement and wonder. How had he known this was what she liked? How could he tell?_

_She wondered if it was because she had always seen Dale as a Boy Scout, and she had fantasized about the day when_ she _might teach_ him _a thing or two. So maybe it had taken her by surprise that it suddenly appeared there was nothing she knew that he_ didn't _know already._

_Standing there in the thin, dissipating steam, Audrey closed her eyes and shivered, wrapping her towel around herself, counting every soreness in her body as she moved through the air like ink in water, like a dream. She smiled._

_A soft knock at the door broke her delicate concentration. “Audrey?”_

_Startled, she pulled the towel closed and fastened it against the swell of her breasts before padding to the door. “I was just getting out…” she said as she pulled the door open._

_Dale stood on the other side. His eyes were sad, his mouth drawn. Crestfallen was the word that sprang to Audrey’s mind as she beheld him. She wondered what had happened._

_“Is everything okay?”_

_He didn’t say a word but simply reached for her, his hands searching her face, combing through her damp hair, running down her shoulders. His eyes followed, and as he took in those same bruises that she’d catalogued herself not moments before, he screwed up his face in grief so intense, grief she hadn’t seen since Leland Palmer had collapsed on his daughter’s casket all those winters ago._

_“Audrey…,” he croaked. “My god, Audrey…what have I done?”_

_He stepped back from her then, and Audrey followed as he made his way to the bed and began reassembling himself, straightening his clothes, searching for his tie. He was frantic; a man unhinged. Audrey watched him in confusion for several long seconds before stepping in to stop him._

_“How long was I out?” he muttered. “How long was I—?”_

_“Dale?” she asked._

_He snapped to. “Don’t,” he warned. “Don’t come near me.”_

_She obeyed, standing stock still where she was. “What’s wrong?”_

_“I can’t be with you.”_

_“Tonight?”_

_“Ever.”_

_The thought hurt more than anything else; she choked on the words as they left her mouth. “How come?”_

_He turned to face her then, his tie crooked around his neck, his suit jacket rumpled. His hair—so carefully-styled—lay lazily across his forehead. He fell apart. “I hurt people when I’m too close to them…”_

_Audrey shook her head. “You didn’t hurt me.”_

_Dale cocked his head to the side and reached forward, his hand trembling as he touched the side of her neck. Audrey thrilled to feel his fingertips on her skin, and her breath hitched in her throat; he pulled away._

_“I don’t remember,” he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut as if he were the one in pain. He sank to the mattress, its blankets and pillows strewn haphazardly about its surface. “I don’t remember...”_  

_His agony was writ large on his open and suddenly expressive face. She took her moment and stepped away from the wall and joined him on the bed. He stiffened, froze at her side. Audrey slipped her hand into his and gently brought it to her lips._

_“What are you talking about?” she asked. “You don’t remember what?”_

_He shook his head; there was no alertness to his voice now, just resignation and fatigue the likes of which she hadn’t heard from him since those heady days at the end of the Palmer investigation._

_“I’m not well, Audrey.”_

_She swallowed hard and squeezed his hand within hers. “You’re sick?” she asked._

_He shook his head. “It’s more than that…I should have told you before. I should have told you everything, but I didn’t, because I thought if you knew that you wouldn’t come, but…"_  

_Audrey cut him off with a kiss that he pulled away from, instinctively. But she caught him by the side deepened until it was more than a kiss, until his flimsy excuses fell away like gossamer threads and left nothing but his ardent hunger in its wake. They were under the covers in no time at all, in midnight darkness that spilled in through the sheer drapes on the window, as their second time blossomed softly between and around them._

_He told her he loved her, that he'd always loved her, and that he needed her more than she could ever know, but she wanted to ask him to pin her down again, to wrap his hands around her neck again, to take her how he’d taken her before. Instead, she stayed quiet, stymied, coming again but not like before, not like breaking bones; her toes didn’t curl, her hands didn’t go numb, she didn’t suddenly lose vision or get the pins and needles sensation in her ankles and the tip of her tongue that she had the first time. Instead of sending her flying to all corners of the room, he kissed her eyelids and the base of her throat and the tip of her nose and the centre of each of her palms before resting his head against her breast and falling into the kind of deep sleep that she assumed followed refractory period sexual congress._

_She didn’t sleep a wink._

_It was the first time she realized what she craved from him, what made her come alive beneath his hard hands, and recognized that it wasn’t what he was capable of giving her. Audrey was confused, about her own feelings, sure, but also about his reaction to it all. His distance, his desperation, the confused way he’d tried to make things better but seemingly without remembering how they’d progressed to that point in the first place._

_The two Dales. She couldn't reconcile them at all. Maybe she didn't want to. Maybe she wanted the first Dale. The one who hurt her, who split her apart with his frantic and overwhelming desire for her; the one who growled and shuddered and clawed at her and used his weight to hold her down so she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything except let the pressure build until she was ready to burst._

_The other Dale was sweet and lovely; he was the Dale she might have wanted at some point before this. But it wasn't the Dale she desperately wanted now. And again. And again._

_The last thing he’d said to her before drifting to sleep was that Albert would know what to do._

_Albert. A name she hadn’t heard in years, but which she shuddered to remember now._

_So it was that there, in a Philadelphia hotel room on her twenty-third birthday, Audrey Horne learned there was something wrong with Dale Cooper._

_Because he’d told her so._

^♢^


	9. I'm Feeling Scared and You Know It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the song "Burning Desire" by Lana Del Ray.

^♢^

_I shouldn’t be driving_ , Audrey thought to herself, tasting the remnants of two ounces of liquor in her mouth as she fished the keys out of Dale's front pocket and poured him into the passenger seat of his rental car. For a brief moment, she panicked over the thought of leaving her own rental car parked in that vacant lot, but it was the only way; she'd call someone from the Los Angeles Field Office to retrieve it the next day, if she couldn't do it herself.

And if it was stolen or impounded in the meantime, well, she have to deal with the fall out of that too. There was nothing else for it. Dale was her one and only priority. 

A quick mental calculation in the bar had determined that she had probably given him enough of the compound to last for an hour, ninety minutes at the very most. But it was a new drug, synthesized within the last few weeks by the team of chemists and professional tinkerers in the lab back in Philadelphia. It had been tested, its efficacy verified, but in laboratory settings; none of them could be entirely sure how it would work in the field. All she knew was that was no buffer period for her to dally in. She had to get him to a safe house before it wore off.

She leaned across him and clicked the seatbelt buckle, fastening it across his middle. His eyes were closed, his head leaned back against the headrest. In that moment, he looked like he was simply sleeping.

Audrey paused to cup his cheek in her hand, wishing that’s all this was: fatigue brought on by jet lag or staying up watching movies or stargazing or whatever else. But it wasn’t that. It hadn’t been that in so long, Audrey wasn’t sure it had _ever_ been that.

“Where ar-r-re we go-o-oing?” he asked, his words like honey falling from his lips in long, slow drops.

Audrey brushed his hair from his eyes and cocked her head to the side. “Somewhere safe,” she told him in a voice normally reserved for bedtime stories. She continued to stroke his hair, still shockingly black and barely tinged with silver, even after all he'd been through, ten years removed from their first, fateful meeting. Soft beneath her fingers, it fell back against his forehead in a delicate wave, the same wave he’d always worn, she imagined, since he was old enough to start caring. She smiled sadly. “Where _you’ll_ be safe.”

Dale’s brow furrowed. He didn’t seem satisfied; he didn’t seem like _anything_. But once he lost the frown, his face returned to placid and emotionless. 

His handsomeness was deceptive; Audrey knew all too well what lurked beneath. 

She stood up and shut the door, careful to avoid closing it on him or any loose articles of his clothing before standing up to her full height and leaning her head back against the car. Her exhalation pulled from deep within her, and she felt momentarily empty as she cast her eyes heavenward, once again reminding herself that there weren't any stars to point the way this time. 

So she squeezed her eyes shut once more and fought the urge to cry. 

This was her fault. She knew it was, Albert be damned. But she heard his voice in her head again, telling her to stop blubbering and just drive already. Part of her wanted to reach across the continent that separated them and wring his neck, but she knew he was right; this was her job. It was _more_ than her job, truthfully. But she’d known what she was getting into. She couldn’t check out now.

Painfully and with great effort, she pulled her head up, hearing and feeling the pop-pop-pop of air pockets in her cervical vertebrae releasing their trapped gases as she moved her neck; her whole body felt like that, ready to crack if only she could be manipulated the right way, pressed and molded until the stress seeped out her pores instead of being stored so close to where she kept her vital organs. 

She rolled her shoulders, moving forward through the darkened parking lot, and swung herself into the driver’s seat.

"You ready?" she asked, almost out of habit; of course he wouldn’t answer. She was talking to no one except herself. With a deep sigh, she turned the key in the ignition and the car's engine roared to life. Sliding into gear, she pressed on the accelerator and eased the car out of the parking lot and onto Sunset.

Her mind wandered as she drove, generally westward, following the roadsigns and totally on autopilot. She’d been to LA before, but even if she hadn’t she reckoned it wouldn’t be all that difficult to navigate from east central to the coast. In any other situation, Audrey would have enjoyed the drive—nighttime in Los Angeles, heading for the ocean, windows down, a breeze in her hair, the radio blaring…

It was enough to make her forget where she _actually_ was, which was turning onto Mulholland Drive after a lengthy and winding detour north through Laurel Canyon.

In the moment before she turned the car’s steering wheel to the left and veered onto Mulholland, Audrey was smiling, oblivious, lost in a train of thought that had long since come unhitched from any objective reality. But in the moment right after she left the relative brightness of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and plunged the car into the darkness of the narrow mountain road, stark realization hit. She had no idea how long she had been daydreaming; she only knew that she was inching along the shoulder of a deserted road cresting the Santa Monica Mountains, miles from any source of help. 

Audrey laughed at first as her confusion turned nervous, then segued into panic. Soon, her hands were sweating, and she felt the buzz of her own anxiety filling the car.

“Oh my god, Audrey, what have you done?” she questioned herself, scanning the road ahead. She could turn around, she reasoned, but that would mean driving back down the canyon, and she was running out of time as it was. Staying on the highway wasn’t a palatable option either; the road serpentined along the top of the world, back and forth in dangerous hairpins as it moved to the west. 

With a sideways glance at Cooper, still asleep in his seat, she made a quick determination. She would press forward, as fast as she could go, and hope for the best. She opened it up, punching the accelerator to the floorboard and speeding along through the midnight blackness, with Hollywood on her left, the Valley on her right, and the dark expanse of the Pacific Ocean waiting just ahead of her if only she could make it.

Audrey’s heart raced, matching the thrum of the engine as they sped along the empty ribbon of asphalt. Not a single car met them in front or overtook them from behind; the headlights shone off bits of brush and forgotten sections of long-ago fences jutting out here and there along the side of the road, but illuminated nothing beyond that. They were, as far as she was concerned, utterly alone. 

Her shaking hands gripped the steering wheel as the car’s accelerometer needle crested the last posted speed limit. It wasn’t quite out of control, but it wasn’t far off either. She barely slowed down to take the turns in the highway, knowing full well how easy it would be for them to break the bonds of the earth and take flight, crashing off the side of the road and down, down, down to the dry mountainside below.

As they swerved and darted along the lonely road, Dale’s hand slipped from his lap and landed between them; his fingertips brushed her exposed thigh. Even with split focus, half on the road and half on his hand, Audrey was certain that she felt his hand flex as it rested there. 

_That_ got her full attention. 

Her breath caught in her throat. His fingers burned her flesh as she watched him finger the edge of her skirt, lingering against her bare skin, which goosepimpled beneath his touch.

“Audrey…” he whispered, and she flicked her eyes to his face.

“Dale?” she asked, hesitant, hopeful for silence. When he didn’t respond, she relaxed. But only slightly.

She shook as she lifted his hand from her leg; when his fingers closed around hers, goosebumps radiated up her arm. She pulled her hand away and held it close to her chest, as if she’d been burned.

If the drugs were wearing off, she was in a bad situation; there was next to nothing she could do. Part of her wanted to leap from the car, leaving it where it was, so she could hightail it out of there and get as far away from him as possible. 

But another part of her, the part that grew up in the darkness of the forests just outside Twin Peaks, wanted something so much more…

“What are you _doing_?” she asked herself.

It would have been poetic, she thought, if the drug wore off before then, before the necessary precautions could be taken, and Dale Cooper came to with fire in his veins instead of blood. Perhaps he'd wrench the wheel out of her hands and they'd careen off the cliff and the car would explode just like in the movies and the ensuing brush fire would devastate the mountainside but it would remove any trace of their bodies, engulfed in flames and reduced to ash and charred bits of bone. 

Or he could surprise her, knocking her unconscious with a single strike to the side of the head, with a closed fist or a concealed weapon, a gun from under the seat or something. She hadn’t checked the car for that before buckling him in. 

Or he could slide his long fingers around her throat and choke the life out of her, parked in a roadside turnout along a Benedict Canyon ley line.

There was very real fear, but a perverse thrill had made its home right next to it, and that made Audrey's skin dance. She flushed from the tops of her ears to the very core of her body; sweat beaded along her hairline and she opened the window to let the cool dark shiver over her.

She thought about stopping the car, pulling over to the shoulder again, throwing the car in Park, and letting it happen, whatever it was. What would be do then? Would he fight her? Or would he just end her, right there? And then he could disappear again. Take the car and drive away. He’d probably never be seen again; a footnote in the files of the FBI under Gordon Cole’s supervision, next to her name. Unsolved disappearances.

But she didn’t. She kept her foot on the pedal. His hand returned to her thigh, his fingertips dimpling her skin. She didn’t bother removing it. He had her where she lived, and they both knew it.

Eventually the isolation came to an end. Mulholland rejoined civilization, and Audrey felt the car winding down to merge with the 405. With sweating, trembling hands, she guided them to the ocean, and before long, they had pulled into the covered car port of the safe house.

The darkened strip of the Pacific Coast Highway where the house sat was far enough north of the pier to be away from the tourists if things should go badly. It was the third in a little enclave of whitewashed homes, which seemed a far cry from the mysterious hills above, where darkness seemed expected. But it was four walls, doors that locked and gates beyond those, and that's what they needed, always, just in case. 

Audrey parked the car in the covered carport and sat for a long moment, collecting herself before she stepped out and walked around the vehicle. The box of supplies she’d requested sat on the sculpted bench beside the door to the main floor; without opening it, she put it inside the house before walking around to the passenger door and pulling Dale from the vehicle. He was pliable in her arms but stood under his own steam; with coaxing, he walked up the three steps from the door that led into the main living area, then the two flights of stairs beyond that that led to the second floor. 

Once there, Audrey led him to one of the bedrooms. Two large windows overlooked the impossibly dark stretch of ocean outside. But Audrey didn’t admire the view for long; now-composed, she deposited him on the bed and began making quick work of his suit jacket.

"Audrey..." he whispered, squeezing her wrist as she leaned across him.

A shot of adrenaline delivered straight to her radial artery caused Audrey to seize up. She tensed her arm and pulled it from his grasp; his strength was returning. 

She pulled back to look at him and saw his icy black eyes heavy lidded as he leaned back on the bed, propped up lazily on his elbows. His head lolled back twice before he gave up and laid back completely against the pillows. 

”You're beautiful," he slurred. "What's your name?"

Audrey shook her head. "You just said my name. Remember?" she said. "It's Audrey."

"I did," he whispered. He brought one hand up to the side of her face and shut his eyes. "I remember. I think I remember...what I don't remember."

Faced with not just the prospect of danger but the actual real threat of it, Audrey became all business. Latent FBI skills, pushed aside in pursuit of a high she'd knew she wasn't going to be able to catch in the very near future, kicked into gear as she went back to the box she’d hauled upstairs and began collecting everything she’d need for the night: a pair of scissors, a coiled length of soft nylon rope, a shallow basin, a cooler of ice, a washcloth...

"I remember you," he said, his voice coming through more strongly now as the drug she'd used to knock him out loosened its hold further still. He moved to sit up, and Audrey pushed him back down. Taking one of his hands, she pulled it up above his head, at which point she tied his wrist to the wooden bed post.

"Kinky," he growled with a laugh that Audrey recognized all too well.

Knotting the rope and cutting it loose, she hurried around the end of the bed and repeated the process on his other wrist, lashing it securely to the opposite bed post.

When Audrey was reasonably certain he could do neither of them any harm, she dropped the scissors onto the small dressing table in the corner of the room and wiped a line of cold sweat from her forehead as she collapsed into the chair near the end of the bed.

He pouted. "You don't want to play with me?" he asked. "Come on, baby. Let me light your fire..."

Audrey closed her eyes, rubbing the ring on her finger again until the skin beneath it began to burn.

^♢^

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh, I've been sitting on this for weeks because it just never felt right, but I have to let it go. If there are any glaring errors or omissions, please let me know. I've been over this so many times that it's all a little bit like gibberish to me...


	10. But I Think I'm Ready, As Long As You're With Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Audrey gets the answers she's been looking for, and makes a decision that will affect everything...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title lifted from "Angels" by The xx

^♢^

_"What's wrong with him?"_

_Albert looked up from his paperwork, ignoring her at first before doing a double-take as he recognized who it was that stood in the doorway to the office. He put the file in his hand down on the desk and leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms in front of him._

_"Well, if it isn't Audrey Horne," he said. "Welcome to the FBI."_

_She pushed herself away from the door frame and into the office, a large shared room with several desks positioned within it; one of them, she knew from the nameplate on the door, was Dale’s. But from looking around the cavernous bull pen, she couldn’t pick out which one it was. Each desk looked identical. Same grey-beige telephones. Same computer terminals. Same black desk chairs. No personal effects, photo frames or coffee mugs filled with novelty ballpoint pens or whatever else it was professionals kept on their desks. The uniformity was eerie._

_Audrey felt as out of place as a cattle rancher at Buckingham Palace, and she must have looked it, too. Albert chuckled, mocking her. “Please. Have a seat."_

_Audrey looked at the wooden chair his outstretched arm was gesturing to. It was six feet too close to his desk for her comfort, but she couldn't very well pick it up and move it across the room, not without being seen as rude, and she couldn’t abide that. Instead, she waited to the count of five in her head before walking over and sitting down._

_“What’s wrong with him, Agent Rosenfield—"_

_“My name,” he said. “You remembered."_

_She ignored him. “I was with Dale last night," she said. "It was my birthday."_

_"Happy belated," he said._

_Audrey screwed up her face. "Why are you being so nice to me? I thought you hated me?"_

_Albert softened; she wondered if he even knew it, so nearly-imperceptible was the shift. “I don’t—wait. You were with him last night?”_

_Audrey nodded. “Is he sick or something? He was acting so funny—”_

_Like a coiled spring let loose, Albert leaned forward in his chair, flipped open a notepad on the desk, and picked up the phone receiver from its cradle. “Where is he now?”_

_She shrugged and blushed, excited at the sudden movement. “At the hotel. Down the road.” She looked up at him then, and the expression on his face unsettled her further. “Why?”_

_Albert punched a four digit phone extension into the base of the phone and began scribbling something on the notepad. There was a long pause as he waited for the line to connect on the other end. “It’s Albert. No, he’s not. He’s at the…” he looked to Audrey. “The hotel? What’s the name?”_

_“The name?” she asked._

_Impatience was Albert’s strong suit, and as his face coloured a shade of red Audrey had never seen before, she sat up straight in her chair._

_“The Mariott. Down the road. I don’t remember the address but—”_

_“The Old City Mariott,” he said. “Yeah. Room—”_

_“Two twenty-one,” Audrey offered._

_“Hear that?” he asked. “No, send two of the boys. You’d better come down here…yeah…yeah, okay.”_

_He hung up the phone and looked at her, but his face had changed, dramatically; he was still all acid and hard angles but his eyes showed his—what was that? fear?—written into every line and crevice and flat plane. Audrey didn’t like the look he gave her one bit. She clenched her fists against her knees._

_“Agent Rosenfield,” she said, her voice trembling. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”_

_He alighted from his chair and walked over to a filing cabinet between his desk and the one opposite it. “I suppose since you’re going to be working with us soon—”_

_“With you?" she asked, her eyes widening. "You work for Gordon too?"_

_He nodded, pulling open the top drawer and retrieving a file from within. “That’s right. Me. Dale. Several others. Cream of the crop, all of us handpicked by Gordon.” Albert looked at her. “You’re the latest recruit.”_

_He walked across the room again and deposited a thick, heavy manila file in her lap. The number on the tab—BR-13539—had been written in Dale’s own hand. Next to it was his name: Dale Bartholomew Cooper._

_A case file._

His _case file._

_Concern knit Audrey’s brows together. “What is this?"_

_Albert sat back in his chair and resting his elbows on the paper littering the surface as he stared at her. He nodded toward the folder. “Open it.”_

_She cleared her throat and sat up, taking the folder and setting it across her knees, crossing her legs in front of her in spite of the ache that still existed between them from the night before. Her thighs hurt, her arms hurt; she’d never been in this much pain the morning after. It was thrilling, and yet her stomach had bottomed out and now sat next to her ankles on the floor. Her mind swam as she opened the folder._

_Albert noticed her discomfort, took in the faint mark on the side of her neck, which just about matched the size of Cooper's mouth exactly, and she could tell that he knew, in an instant, what had happened and why she was asking the questions she was asking. He cocked his head to the side._

_"I told you to stay away from him, didn’t I?” he asked. But it was neither a warning nor censure. There was something else, something sad and resigned. It had been four years since she'd last seen him, but he looked like he’d aged a decade._

_"I remember," she whispered, running her hand over the agency staff photo of Dale paper-clipped to the inside of the folder, next to a top sheet information page filled with his vital stats. His handsome face staring out at her from what had to be a very serious—and lengthy—case file that lived in a file drawer at the FBI frightened her tremendously._

_Albert looked down at the papers in the folder. For a very long moment, he was perfectly still and silent as the grave as she flipped through them, not able to take any of it in. Dates, field notes, incident reports, some of them going back years, from cities all over the country, including Twin Peaks; Audrey wanted to ask what it all meant, these numbers, the words next to them. But before she could make a move, Albert shifted in his seat, and all her attention fell to him._

_"I was wrong to tell you that," he said. "He_ needs _you._ I _need you. And_ that _, my friend, is why you're here."_

_Audrey felt her vision tunnelling as Albert spoke, going into detail about the things that sat under her itching palms in the papers she was thumbing through; she was certain she was only catching every second or third word at this point, and despite her apparent perusal, her eyes had glossed over sometime before._

_Thankfully, the veteran FBI Agent recognized what she was displaying. He stopped and leaned forward in his chair, which now sat a few feet from hers; their knees were only inches apart._

_"Audrey?" he asked. "You still with me?"_

_She blinked and nodded before shaking her head. "I don't understand. You're saying...it's not really him?"_

_"We just don't know," he replied. "The earthbound explanation is that he's suffering from some kind of dissociative identity disorder, or at the very least a series of strange fugue states, previously unknown to medical science, that last anywhere from a few minutes to several days." He paused and shrugged. "But then that's just based on our reading of the DSM-IV. He hasn’t been evaluated by a shrink. He'd never work in the FBI again if an official psych eval came back showing what we think it would show."_

_"But why is he still working at all?" she asked. "I mean, shouldn't he be getting help?"_

_"He is," Albert said. "The best help he can get."_

_"How?" Audrey asked. In her mind, a person with this kind of illness needed medical treatment, doctors and psychiatrists to monitor him; he definitely shouldn’t be still working for the Federal Bureau of Investigations._

_Albert sighed. "This whole thing started within a Blue Rose Case, that's how it's got to be solved,” he said. “If we take him to a shrink and they see that he's lost his marbles, they’ll have to file a report, and that’ll get handed up the chain until the Director himself’ll come down from on high and suspend him, probably, as a first step towards his eventual termination and then we’ll never figure out how to fix this." He shook his head. "The irony of this whole thing is that of all the people on the planet to figure this mess out, he's the best. We need him here. We can help him here.” He stopped and scoffed. “What fucking luck…”_

_Audrey tried to wrap her head around what she was hearing, none of which made any sense. When Albert's hand appeared in her peripheral, his fingers gently touching the bruise on the side of her neck, she startled momentarily and jerked away out of fright._

_"Are you okay?" he asked her, his voice low, his concern evident; it was a side to Albert Rosenfield she’d never seen; she wasn’t sure how to react. "Did he hurt you?"_

_She didn't want to admit that he had, because that would mean admitting, if only to herself, that she had enjoyed it, that it was real and it had mattered, and she had liked every minute of it. So she simply shook her head and lied through her teeth. "No, no of course not.” An easy lie, sparing his sensibilities; she closed her eyes and sighed, wondering if it was the right thing to do, wondering if it even mattered. She didn't know him very well, but Agent Rosenfield had never struck her as the type of person who had sensibilities that needed sparing in the first place._

_She was lying for her sake, not his. She knew that. And when she opened her eyes, she saw that he knew it too._

_"He can hurt you," Albert said. "He's certainly capable of it."_

_His words had the tinge of experience to them; Audrey didn’t know how to ask what he meant. ”How long has this been going on?"_

_"At least the last five years, since he came out of the forest in Twin Peaks,” Albert answered. “But when we started digging into his past...there are records going back decades. We talked to his neighbours, his classmates, the woman who babysat him from the age of five through nine. There are a lot of things that don't add up, that point to him being affected for a hell of a lot longer than just the last five years." He looked down at his hands. "Maybe he came back from those woods with a piece of the darkness that lives there, or maybe what happened in those woods triggered something that's been dormant within him since he was a boy.” He leaned back a bit. “That’s what we're trying to figure out."_

_Audrey shivered at the mention of the woods, of the darkness. She knew, all too well, what that could look like; she’d seen it, up close, on the faces of the men who came to hunt and fish and stayed at the hotel before setting off into Ghostwood Forest, only to return with a haunted look in their eyes. She’d felt it, in her skin on cool summer nights when she left her window open and felt the breeze move through the trees outside, or when the snow fell and coated those same trees in thick layers of the stuff, making them look like ghosts themselves. The darkness lived in her; she thought it probably always would. So why couldn’t it have set up residence in Dale Cooper as well?_

_She looked up at Albert, studying him for the first time. “You're the one who’s been protecting him?"_

_He nodded. "Him and everyone else around him," he admitted. "I don't want to see_ him _hurt, and I don't want to see him hurt anyone_ else _." He scoffed. "I guess that's what you do when you care about someone, right?"_

_Audrey cocked her head to the side, remembering the embrace she'd seen in the school hallway. The bruise on Albert's face. His stern warning and her suspicion. Pieces of a puzzle she didn’t know she was in the middle of solving began to fall into place._

_“It’s more than that, though,” she said. “You love him, don't you?”_

_Albert didn't lift his eyes to meet hers as he offered the only answer she knew he was capable of giving through the obvious sting of unrequited devotion clouding his voice and his eyes: "So do you."_

_Audrey sat up a little straighter in her chair. "Why was I really requested, Agent Rosenfield?"_

_He cleared his throat but didn't speak for a few moments. She could almost see him collecting his thoughts, whirling them into place in his mind before opening his mouth. "Cooper says he dreams about you. Nightly, almost, but definitely with a regularity that made us take notice once he told us about it. He says it's been like that since he left Twin Peaks. Since he was hospitalized there, before his departure." He leaned back in his chair. “When he comes out of these fugues, you're all he can talk about. Gordon took that as a sign that you needed to be involved in some way. He’s known for a few years now. He’s been watching you. Waiting for you to grow up.”_

_He said it with derision but Audrey brushed it aside; there were more important things to deal with than the sentiments expressed in a moment of frustration by an acerbic and crotchety FBI Agent who never seemed to like anyone, not as far as she could tell. There was no longer any reason to seek his validation; this wasn't about her anymore._

_"We needed someone we could trust,” Albert continued. “Someone he had a connection to, who had a connection with him, who would agree to help him the way he needs to be helped.”_

_Audrey sniffled. "I dream about him too," she said. "Strange dreams."_

_"Red rooms?" Albert asked._

_She nodded; he seemed resigned and defeated._

_"Does he know?" she asked. "Does he know what's happening to him?"_

_Albert nodded. "He doesn't_ remember _what happens, necessarily, but he knows. And when he’s awake and lucid, we work together on a solution. It’s all we do these days. There hasn’t been a new case on my desk in years. It’s all about this now.”_

_She swallowed, her tongue thick within her mouth. "What's involved?"_

_Albert paused, sizing her up. ”You would need to learn to recognize when he's about to shift. Isolate him until it passes," he replied. "We're working on drugs in the meantime, Sam Stanley and his boys. The hope is, with regular doses of medication, we could calm the shifts, make them less frequent or pass more quickly." He swallowed. “You’d have the rank and title of Special Agent but you wouldn’t be in the field on your own cases. You would have one job, and that is to be his shadow. When he tracks down a lead, you go with him. When he needs to go to the library to research voodoo charms, you go with him. If he needs to fly across the country to speak in tongues with the snake charming mountain men of Buttfuck Nowhere, Kentucky, or a mystical shaman in the middle of the Quebec Laurentians during a blizzard, or a Druidic priestess on the outskirts of Dublin, you go with him.”_

_Audrey nodded, scared witless but pressing forward in spite of the danger she felt rising up around her like flood waters she’d soon be unable to outrun._

_"On occasion he has slipped away, disappeared,” Albert continued. “Then it's up to us to track him down. That's the first step in the Doomsday Scenario, by the way. If he started on some kind of killing spree—"_

_The words introduced a stark image to her mind, of her Special Agent with blood on his hands...and she remembered the look in his eyes the night before, coal black and stoked by a fire that raged within him. A fire she had touched, one she wanted to burn for her, too. A shudder rippled from the base of her neck and down along her spine, branching out along nerve endings that suddenly blazed to life until she felt everything, every square inch of her sweater touching her skin, or every erect hair follicle on each arm, or even the jittering flight of a thousand butterflies that seemed set to swirl in her stomach from now until the end of time, for as long as Dale Cooper was in her life. She felt it all, exquisitely, and she understood the coiled spring that she'd seen in Albert when she first arrived. She felt it too, bundles of stored energy in every joint, ready to spring into action at the first word. She never wanted it to end._

_Audrey closed her eyes and breathed, and made a decision. "Okay," she whispered. "Okay, I'll do it."_

_Albert pulled back on the rhetoric. "I don't want to lie to you. It won't be easy. You should know all of this before you dive in. That's the only reason I'm being blunt. No one is going to hold your hand but we won't send you in there without training, without everything you need to know," he said, pausing to gauge her reaction. "In five years, he's only ever gone after his handler, and his only handler has been me, so—”_

_“Okay," she repeated. "I'll do it."_

_Albert either couldn't or didn't want to hear her. “Because I can’t…” he started, trailing off as he turned and faced the large expanse of windows behind him. He exhaled sharply but didn’t turn back to face her. “Five years of this, seeing him like this…" he trailed off, again._ _For a long moment, Albert continued to stare out the window; when he turned back, the deep emotions written on his face were harder to read than she’d ever seen, but she was almost certain if she hadn’t been sitting there, he might have broken down and cried._ _“Dale’s obvious attachment to and deep affection for you makes you different. I don't know how. Lord knows I don't know why,” Albert said, his voice cracking. He coughed and cleared his throat. “But maybe because of the way he feels about you, he won’t want to hurt you, and that—”_

_Audrey reached over and put her hand on his, and for the first time since she'd sat down, Albert was the one to be surprised. He turned his hand so it faced hers, palm to palm, and she squeezed it gently._

_"I'm in," she said. And in that moment, it didn't matter if she said it because she was afraid for Dale, or because of that obsidian black that lived within them both, or if it was simply because she wanted—inexplicably and suddenly—to help the man in front of her. All she knew was that she wanted a part of this; that was all that mattered._

_Albert nodded and squeezed her hand back. "Well, Cherry, I guess we'll need to get you set up."_

^♢^

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if I'll get to update again over the weekend, so let me say Io Saturnalia and Happy Festivus and Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah and Joyous Kwanzaa and all the rest! I hope you all have a peaceful holiday celebrated with the ones you love! Thanks for reading and sticking with me and my crazy stories all these months. You'll never know how much it means to have you all here :)


	11. I've Got A Bad Desire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dark deeds in dark rooms...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heed the warnings: this chapter is squicky, with definite non-con elements throughout. 
> 
> Chapter title from Bat for Lashes' cover of Springsteen's "I'm On Fire"

^♢^

An hour passed, and then two. The dark night turned to very early morning, as Audrey sat beside Dale's restrained body, running the cloth wet with ice water over the sweating skin of his forehead, his neck, the broad firmness of his chest. She'd unbuttoned his dress shirt and discarded his necktie, in order to give him as much free air as she could while he worked through the tail end of the tranquilizer she'd given him and fought through the worst of the fugue. 

The confrontation was always the hardest. Whatever personality overtook him in those moments—whether it was truly BOB or whether it was some dark, dormant part of himself triggered by his confrontation with the Black Lodge—it was clear that it was not a fan of being caught; when it recognized that the jig was up, that's when all hell broke loose.

Audrey had coaxed him through dozens of these moments, some worse than others, and very often with nothing more than her wits to help her. The learning curve was indeed steep, and even with Albert’s help, in the first year as his handler, she’d had a number of very close calls. In New Orleans, tracking down a Blue Rose lead that Dale was certain would lead to more answers about the Lodges themselves, she’d missed the signs of his impending shift completely and had nearly been killed after he'd come at her with a fire poker in the drawing room of the bed and breakfast they were staying in. Another time, in Montana of all places, during a frigid January week spent with an historian at the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Centre going over journal entries Dale was positive contained links to his own experience, he’d locked her out on the balcony of their motel room and tried to escape out the front door; she had been forced to climb down the fire escape and gave chase on foot before disarming him in the parking lot by shooting out all four tires on their rental car so he couldn’t make his getaway.

But those close calls were few and very far between these days. She’d learned to recognize his tells, and with an ever-expanding array of pharmaceutical concoctions at the ready—and always with Dale’s explicit orders to use any and all means necessary to stop him—Audrey had only been caught unawares four times in the last few years.

_Five times,_ Audrey corrected herself, wondering how she’d managed to miss the signs this time.

Pre-fugue Dale was usually easy to spot, but once he’d shifted completely it was anyone’s guess what he might do. Sometimes he did nothing; other times he grew so violent, full of rage and malice that Audrey had a hard time reconciling with the gentle man she also knew him to be. She’d seen him cry in frustration and she’d watched him sleep for 36 hours straight; he could be dazed, lost and confused and unable to do much of anything, or he could be clever and cunning. You’d never know what kind of shift you’d be in for until it was happening and you were in it up to your eyeballs. You always had to be on your toes, or else he could run circles around you and you’d never know what hit you until it was too late.

He’d also managed to evade them twice now—once on that night in Philadelphia, at the bar with her, when Albert had dropped the ball, and once again the day before, when he’d slipped away and gone clear across the country before they realized he was missing. 

The first time they’d been lucky; the second time…well, Audrey wasn’t sure. Looking at him now,straining against the ropes that held him fast to the bed as his fevers broke over him, she wondered: What was he truly capable of when she wasn’t around? 

She felt dispassionate and removed. Tired. Older than her twenty-eight years would otherwise attest. When she'd escaped from Twin Peaks hoping for a life of adventure, this wasn't what she'd had in mind.

And yet, it was the only path that made any kind of sense.

"Audrey?" 

She snapped her attention to his face, working the cold, damp cloth over his forehead. "Yes, Dale?"

"Where are we?"

"Santa Monica," she told him, swiping a finger against her nose. "We're on the beach. The ocean is outside the window right there."

"Can I see it?"

She looked down at him. In the cool night light, his eyes still looked steely and hard, but so did everything else. His words belied his state of mind; perhaps he was out of it, on the other side, coming back to her.

Audrey looped an errant forelock of his ebony hair around her fingertips and lifted it from his face, smoothing it back across the top of his head in a crude facsimile of his usual, carefully-sculpted hairstyle. His skin was cool to the touch. She closed her eyes and let her fingernails graze his scalp as she ran her hand through his hair. Beneath her ministrations, Dale sighed.

"Yeah," she whispered. "Okay. Let's watch the ocean."

She removed her hand from his hair and began working the knot at his wrist. The rope slid free, and he slowly removed his hand from the wooden post, lifting it up only to bury it in the hair behind her ear.

"Oh Audrey," he whispered as she leaned into his touch. He pulled her down to him, and she pressed her lips to his.

It shouldn't have surprised her when he bit her lower lip, drawing it into his mouth until she cried out in pain and pulled back in utter shock. His eyes flashed as he gripped the hair at the nape of her neck and tugged on it.

"You like it rough, don't you?" 

Audrey's pulse quickened. "Let go of me."

"You don't want that. Not really," Dale grinned at her.

Tears sprang to her eyes. _Stupid stupid girl_ , she told herself. ”You’re hurting me.”

"Oh, come on," he teased. "You've been wanting this all night. Don't pretend that isn't the reason you took the longest possible way here, the reason you drove here with enough alcohol in your system to get you in biiiig trouble.” He _tsked_. “You _wanted_ this to happen. You _want_ the danger. The pain. It's all you've been thinking about since you tied him to this bed."

He pulled her down, against her resistance, until his mouth was on her neck, below her ear. Audrey pulled back, but Dale's grip was stronger; he held her tight, close, his lips pressed to the cup of her ear as he spoke.

"Aren't you the least bit curious about me, Audrey?"

Her stomach clenched. "C-curious?" 

Dale nodded, slow and smooth, his stubbled jaw rough against her skin. Audrey winced and once more tried to pull away, only to feel his hand tighten in her hair. 

"What would it be like? To fuck him when he's like this? Let him hold you down and have his way with you...or to have your way with him?" he murmured, kissing his way from the helix to her earlobe before settling against her again, ghosting his lips against the conch. "Don't you want to feel the temperature inside of his mouth?"

She looked at him, pulling back against his hand even though it hurt her scalp to do it. "Who are you?" she asked, meeting his gaze, inches from his face.

"I'm him," he said simply, lowering his voice to a sinister whisper. "And let me tell you a little secret: He wants it just as bad as you do."

He yanked again on her hair, exposing her throat to him, and pulled her down until his lips pressed against her pulse point; he licked a stripe from the base of her throat up to her jaw, and she shivered involuntarily at the startling sensation of it.

"Don't lie to yourself," he whispered against her skin.

"Stop it," she whispered back.

"Kiss me.”

It startled her, the clarity of voice with which he spoke, tiptoeing up to that line that she had never crossed before and beckoning her to cross it with him. Her heartbeat pulsed beneath her skin, against his lips. She shut her eyes and hummed; Dale suckled at her throat.

He repeated the command. “Kiss me…”

So she did. She turned her face towards his and he pulled away, lifting his face to hers as she leaned in. He eased up, loosening his grip on her hair as she pressed her lips to his. Reaching up into her hair for his hand, she threaded her fingers through his and pulled it away, and with her hair released, she slanted her mouth across his, delving as deeply as she could go. 

He reciprocated, hungry tongues jockeying for position within each other’s mouths, coming up only for air, and even then the breaths were half-formed, comprised of discarded exhalations from the other’s lungs as much as from the salty sea air that floated in through the open window on the opposite side of the room. 

He tasted foreign, and she felt intoxicated. But it wasn’t enough to make her forget herself. Still holding his hand, she broke away from his mouth and swiftly retied his wrist to the bedpost.

Dale growled and pulled at the restraint as she knotted the rope, twice; but his mouth found the rise of her breast and through two layers of fabric she felt the wet, hot heat of him as he pressed against the swell as she leaned across his body. 

Audrey closed her eyes and leaned her head against the headboard. It felt better than good, and yet was the most wrong thing that could happen between them.

“Stop,” she commanded.

“You don’t mean that.”

Still straining against the ropes, he craned his neck, plying her body with kisses as she remained there, hovering over him. _Just move,_ she thought. _Stand up. Walk away. Leave the room and lock the door. Don’t look back…_

But something else inside her had snapped. Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the relative safety of the situation, with him restrained and unable to do his worst. Whatever it was, it overtook her; she lifted her leg onto the bed and slid her knee across his waist, planting it on the other side of his body. The seam in her skirt ripped fully as she settled into the straddle, pressing herself into the hard warmth of his groin.

He grinned at her. “Did I call it or what?” he asked.

Audrey tugged at the hem of his shirt, tucked into his trousers, and tore the remaining fasteners open, sending them flying across the room as she exposed his full torso to her hands. Her desperate hands trembled against the button and zipper fly of his pants, which she worked down just enough to free the length of him from within his boxers. She gripped him in her hand, working him from base to tip as he threw his head back and groaned in pleasure. 

She didn’t wait long to take him within her. Thighs spread wide, she shoved her panties aside and lifted herself up to hover, barely, above him before sliding down completely, burying him to the hilt. He was fire, hotter than hell, and Audrey cried out from the pain of it, the burning. But it didn't last long. Soon she was rocking against him, feeling him as deep as he could go, both of them grinding and writhing and gasping for air.

Audrey didn’t know when the tables turned, or how, but somehow he had managed to free his hands, and as she felt her own blistering orgasm welling up within her, she became aware of his palms on her, against her stomach, fingers arced over her hips. Before she knew what was happening, before she could react from within the haze of her own impending climax, Dale had lifted her from him and flipped her onto her back. He towered over her on the bed, spreading her thighs and delving to her core, two fingers scissoring within her. 

She barely had time to tell him she was coming before she did, pressed against the heel of his palm as her vision clouded and she lost track of her senses. While she was coming down, she found herself suddenly lashed to the centre post of the bed, her hands bound together tightly above her head.

Dale straddled her waist. From that vantage point, helpless as she was, she couldn't help but recall every moment between them that had led to this: breakfasts in the Great Northern, malts in his room, a dance at Doug Milford's wedding and another at the tacky party celebrating the one year anniversary of Laura's murder. Drinks on her birthday, their first time in a Philadelphia hotel room...

He reached down to her and brushed her hair out of her face; his eyes were dark, shaded in shadow. It was heady and alarming and Audrey felt her fear give way to burning in her belly as her arousal grew, as it always did. When he eased up, shifting his weight off of her body enough that he could flip her over onto her belly, Audrey thrilled, her breath catching in her throat. She pressed her face into the pillow and pushed herself up onto her knees and elbows, backing her hips up until she met his behind her. 

Dale wasted no time slipping within her, gripping her hips to hold her steady as he thrust. Audrey gripped the length of rope that extended from the bedpost to tie her wrists together, holding it for leverage and balance as he pulsed within her from behind. His hands squeezed her, hot and insistent; she wanted bruises in her flesh, and she bit the pillow as he delivered. 

With each low grunt, timed with each thrust, he brought her closer to the edge of yet another orgasm. Her knees hurt; she was sure the ropes were cutting her wrists. At any moment he could end her life and she would never see it coming; so with each push back of her body against his, every inch of him she felt impaled within her, she gasped and cried out, out of fear as much as anything else.

Suddenly, and without warning, he stopped. Audrey felt his hand, trembling and light, run its way up her spine. His fingers, once red hot, had become icy and cold as death.

"Audrey?"

She lifted her head, listening carefully to the sound of his voice and the ragged draws of each breath he made. She couldn't be sure of it then, but when his fingers began to pull and tug at the knot holding her to the bed frame, there was no doubt left in her mind that the dissociative state was coming to an end, and the real Dale was returning…

"So close," she whispered, begging. "Don't stop. God, Dale, please don't stop."

Dale's hands stopped untying, and for a heartbreaking moment she thought he would stop everything altogether; but when he picked up his pace—he, him, her Special Agent—Audrey elated. Dale reached a cold hand between her legs, pressing against the sensitive core of her, and just like that, she was undone. Shaking, trembling, flying apart at the seams. He held her fast and close, moving quickly and deep within her, until her shuddering ceased and his orgasm mounted. With a guttural cry of his own, Dale bent forward, covering her body with his as he came hard and fast, emptying himself inside her. 

A breathless moment passed in virtual silence, save for the harsh and harried breaths wrenched from the air around them. Finally, he pulled himself out of her; she pressed her forehead into the mattress, stunned and shaken by what had just transpired. 

"My god," he whispered. "Audrey? Talk to me, Audrey."

Trembling, she rolled herself over, coming face to face with him, the real him, and there was no question that that's who it was staring down at her with the deepest concern on his altogether too-handsome face. He soothed a hand over her face, brushing hair from her eyes. 

"Here..." he whispered, reaching one hand up to finish loosing the ties that still bound her wrists above her head. Rubbed raw, Audrey felt the cool sting of the air and knew that she was bleeding. It was her own fault for pulling so hard against the ropes; she knew that.

"Oh Dale," she whispered against his skin. “Oh god please…please don't remember this in the morning."

He rested his forehead against hers before pressing a tender kiss to her lips as her arms circled his neck and she drew him down to her. Within seconds, just like every other time, he had fallen into a deep and—probably—dreamless sleep. 

Audrey held him close to her until her own fitful sleep claimed her.

^♢^


	12. And How You Might Have Changed It All For Him

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Four years earlier. It's Audrey's first time in the field, and Albert has some advice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title borrowed from the song "Intuition" by Feist.

^♢^

_Audrey stepped across the threshold of the door between the room she was sharing with Dale and the one occupied by Albert. Albert stood next to her, his hand at her elbow. She shook from head to toe; as she brought her hand up to push errant curls off her forehead, she noticed the tremble in her fingertips and clenched her fist before dropping it back to her side. Exhaling loudly, she sank onto the edge of Albert’s bed, not caring that she hadn’t been invited to do so._

_This was her first time in the field; without saying so, she knew that this had been a test. And she wondered how she’d done. After months of training and close supervision, Albert had become more than just her training agent and mentor. To call him a friend might have been a stretch, but she couldn’t stand the thought of disappointing him._

_Closing her eyes, she sent up a wordless prayer that she'd met with his approval._

_“You okay?” he asked her._

_She nodded. Both hands gripped the comforter beneath her. “Is that normal?”_

_Albert glanced back at the door—still slightly ajar, just in case—and nodded. “Well,” he admitted with a shrug. “Inasmuch as any of this is normal, that is.”_

_Audrey followed his eyes to the door and regarded it with a mix of fear and curiosity. It had taken the two of them three hours to corral and calm him. Now Dale Cooper was sleeping soundly and deeply but with the aid of a cocktail of sedatives, and all that separated them was 1 3/4” of plywood door and the reinforced leather straps still securing him to the bed frame._

_Audrey was certain she’d never seen anyone so full of fire and anger before. It had started innocently enough, with a darkness in his eyes and a drop in his voice. Alerted to the shift, Albert and Audrey had been ready for what was about to come. But the things he’d said to them were more horrible than anything Audrey had ever heard. Ways he'd kill them, how he'd watch them die, what he'd do to their bodies when it was done. The jerking way the subtlest of his mannerisms now hitched, joints stiff and off somehow, lent the whole scene a terrifying surrealism; he was both Dale and notDale.Watching him pace, his eyes never leaving theirs, had been absolutely chilling._

_Intoxicating._

_Audrey had been the one to overpower him, on her own, managing to put her training to what she considered good use. She’d been the one to pin him to the floor; with her knee on his chest, she’d managed to hold his arm down and administer the first injection to his upper arm, intramuscularly. She had been able to maneuver him to the hotel bed, had fastened the arm band restraints that would make sure that if the muscle relaxant wore off he still wouldn’t be able to weaponize a table lamp or something and use it against them. And when Albert produced the second syringe, filled with the synthetic compound designed to reverse the fugue, it had been Audrey who’d found the vein in Dale’s elbow, Audrey who’d pushed the needle into his arm, Audrey who’d depressed the plunger and sent the drug into his bloodstream._

_It had taken all of her resolve to finally sit next to him and talk him down after the poisonous display while the drug kicked in. Running her hands down the sides of his face, his neck and shoulders, the lengths of his arms, as she whispered and cooed and hoped it was helping, while he muttered curse words and spoke of the many vile ways he intended on exacting revenge against her; violent, sexual mutterings that ignited her fear, triggered her fight-or-flight response, but kept her firmly rooted to his side._

_She was outwardly unflustered. Inside, she was a mess._

_She’d read Dale’s dossier from cover to cover, had practically memorized it and every field report Albert had filed since she began her training. Shadowing Albert for the past several months, she’d seen Dale like this too, but had never taken an active role in his suppression. She knew, without a doubt, what to expect. Actually participating in it, being a target, had shaken her in ways she had never expected. It had been abstract before, directed at Albert and not her, never this pointed._

_She knew this wasn’t the same Dale who, together with Albert, had formed the other two points in the closest thing she had to a family since she’d turned her back on Twin Peaks. But for some reason she didn't really know it until then. As the full realization of Dale’s weakness hit her, she knew that she had to pick up the slack if the unit was to stay strong. Her role became clear. She had a responsibility to Dale, to Albert. To herself._

_Then why was she only able to think about kissing the inside of a trussed up Dale Cooper's wrist, or of running her teeth along the line of his collarbone?_

_Unnerved, she shifted against the comforter._ Focus _. "I could use a drink,” she muttered to herself._

_Albert was one step ahead of her; Audrey noticed with some sense of relief that he’d already procured two bottles of vodka from the mini bar. Uncapping them both, he poured them into a glass tumbler and handed it to her. “Just this once,” he said. “And only because I’m here. You need to stay sharp in case he comes to and nothing has changed.”_

_Audrey hesitated to take the glass. “If you don’t think—”_

_Albert insisted, pushing the glass toward her. “Take it, Audrey. It’s fine. You’re off the clock now,” he told her. “And you’ve earned it.”_

_Audrey felt her stomach flutter at the compliment. “Thank you,” she whispered, feeling the weight of the glass in her hand as she lifted it to her lips and drank half of it down in one gulp. She didn’t even like vodka. But as the liquid poured down her throat, she closed her eyes and luxuriated in the sensation before pulling what was left in the glass into her mouth and swallowing it all down._

_“What’s the worst you’ve seen?” she asked, setting the empty glass back on the nightstand._

_Albert lowered himself into the chair beside the bed. He leaned back, his head parallel with the crack in the door so he could keep Dale in his sightline, and then turned back to face her. “Three years ago. Albuquerque,” he said, without missing a beat._

_“What happened?”_

_He sighed. “We were at a hotel, a lot like this one. Going over the next day’s plan. We were trying to track down a Navajo elder, a professor at the University of New Mexico, who’d written a book about the Lodges,” Albert said, pausing to collect his thoughts. Audrey watched as he gripped the armrests for several long seconds, white-knuckled, before relaxing his hands; unspoken pain was written all over his face._

_She wondered how long it would take for her own face to wear the clues of her dealings with Dale Cooper._

_“I lost focus. Hesitated,” Albert continued. “He got my gun away from me. It took all night and everything I had to talk him down but eventually I did, and he fell asleep. When he woke up he didn’t remember a thing. But I remembered.”_

_He looked up at her, his eyes shadowed by the table lamp in the corner behind her and the ridge of his own brow. Captivated, Audrey couldn’t look away; but the intensity he bore and laser-focused toward her was frightening._

_“That’s the hardest part,” he said, his voice low and tremulous. “You can go through all the training in the world and it will still never prepare you for the feeling you get when you have to face a man who spits venom at you one minute and can’t remember any of it the next, even though you remember everything.” He looked down at his hands. “A man who…a man you know is good and strong and who desperately needs your help but who is possibly the only person in the world who can hurt you in a way that makes you feel like you deserve it.”_

_Audrey cleared her throat. “He doesn’t mean to, I’m sure.”_

_“That doesn’t make it hurt any less,” he said._

_Audrey cocked her head to the side. “I saw you and him once,” she said, blurting it out all at once. “In the hallway at the high school. It was the anniversary of Laura’s death. They gave Dale an award.”_

_Albert was still, silent as the grave; his face had blanched. Audrey didn’t like the thought that something she’d said had shocked him in such a way. So she pressed on, filling the space with words out of habit and necessity, a desire to avoid the awkwardness of a too-quiet conversation._

_“You gave him a injection. He must have been shifting, I know that now. But at the time, it seemed so…” Audrey trailed off, wondering how to describe it, if she should describe it at all. She sighed instead. “It was dangerous. I knew it then, but I don’t think I knew that I knew it. Does that make sense?”_

_Albert nodded. “They were difficult days. Early days. We didn’t know what we were really dealing with back then.” The colour had returned to his face. He was no longer looking her in the eyes; they were cast down at the floor, his knees, anywhere but her face. “At first he was just another agent. But we had a close working relationship, built on mutual respect, and over time he became like a brother to me. Twin Peaks changed all of that. For a time I thought we’d lost him completely, but when he came back he was different, and I thought…” he huffed. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this…” he muttered._

_“Don’t then,” Audrey leveled._

_He eyed her, anger flashing across his eyes before he softened and chuckled. “But then you came along,” he said. “And he fell for you. Hard. Coop has always had an eye for pretty faces but you were different. And it took me a while to see it but once I did…I realized he was all yours. And he always would be.”_

_Audrey stared at her hands, pale and white and small against the comforter. “Does he know how you feel?”_  
_Albert shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “He’d never return it. Maybe in his altered mind he would, but the only way I’d ever find out is by breaking the trust he’s put in me to watch his back when he gets like that.” He shook his head. “Maybe that part of him knew. He knew how to push my buttons, but I could never give in, even at his most insistent. Even when he was practically begging for it..." he trailed off, lost in memories barred to her, for good reason._

_"But it wasn't him," he said finally. "It would never have been him. Not the real him, anyway.”_

_Audrey smiled, sadly, at the thought of the “real” Dale. The one who liked bird watching, who looked up the Latin names for every tree he encountered, who treated every cup of coffee as thought it might be his last and who would rather die than turn down a slice of pie. The man who could go for months without incident, who was capable of such love and tenderness, who had apparently chosen her and who, once he awoke from his stupor in the room next door, would want to hold Audrey’s hand and have her recount his actions and beg for forgiveness before asking “What’s next?” and pushing on, continually, towards the end goal._

_Her guilt over her previous mental wanderings rose up like bile in her throat and she shook her head, banishing the violation and all its associated repercussions from her mind. She didn’t realize it, but she was crying. As she blinked, a tear landed on her knee. Embarrassed, she swiped at it and then at her eyes._

_“He trusts you. He’s connected to you, somehow, and it runs deep. And he loves you,” Albert said with a shrug. “The real Coop is all yours. He’s always been yours.”_

_“I’m sorry,” she whispered._

_Albert allowed himself a small chuckle. “Don’t be,” he said, growling the words as much as speaking them. He leaned forward and his hand entered her field of vision, and he wrapped his fingers around hers and squeezed._

_“You’re a good kid, Audrey. You have him, but I have you. And if that’s the closest I’ll get to having him, then I’m grateful for it. For you.”_

_Audrey smiled and opened her mouth to say something. But Albert cleared his throat and his face hardened; the moment, however brief, was over._

_“You did well in there. Really well.”_

_“Yeah?”_

_“Yeah. And that’s good, because one day—sooner than you think—you’ll be on your own with him. I won't be there to help you, to back you up. Do you think you can handle it?”_

_Audrey nodded, her breast swelling with pride. His confidence in her was inspiring._

_Albert seemed satisfied. “Good,” he said, standing up. “I’m going to check on him. Then you should go to bed. I’ll take the first watch shift.”_

_"Albert?"_

_He half turned. "Yeah?"_

_"I won't let you down."_

_He chuckled but it was mirthless. "Don't write cheques you can't cash, Cherry."_

_Then he excused himself without so much as another word, walking back across the threshold and into Cooper's room._

_Audrey was left with the silence, her thoughts sloshing around next to two ounces of vodka in her brain. It was a lot to take in; the dynamics of their group had shifted ever-so-slightly against their foundation, and Audrey needed to get used to the sudden tilt in the floor, the way the doors no longer closed tight in their jambs._

_Dale Cooper could be an angel or a demon, and the only two people who'd know which was which were both madly in love with him._

_But which him?_

_The ring he'd given her wrapped around her finger, simple and sweet. As she waited for Albert to return, that was the question taking root on the fertile plains of her young and eager mind._

^♢^

 


	13. The Dark Was Never Just For Us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the edge of the world, on the edge of night, Audrey tries to navigate through the choppy waters of the nightmare she's created...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title lifted from Kimbra's "As You Are"

^♢^

As the sun dropped off the edge of the world in front of her, Audrey pressed her toes into the cold sand and pulled the edges of her pale blue cardigan around her shoulders to stave off the coming chill of evening. She'd been sitting there for hours now, listening to the sounds of the shoreline, counting the bird calls she heard and wondering how many layers of clothing she could feasibly put on to ensure a quick and waterlogged end should she decide to wade out into the waves.

_No_ , she thought. _If you end it here, who keeps going? Who protects Dale? Who saves him from whatever this is that's got a hold of him?_

With a scornful scoff, Audrey shook her head. 

_Who’s doing that now?_

She pushed her toes deeper into the sand, hitting a layer of dampness and revelling in the sensation, if only so that it would distract her from the disturbing thoughts crowding her brain.

It suddenly struck her as tragically funny that she was wrapped in rich fabrics from the waist up and yet sat in the cold sand wearing nothing but a pair of pyjama shorts, her bare legs winter pale and pink from the cold. She shivered and wished she’d brought a blanket out with her. It may have been Southern California, but it _was_ wintertime. Nobody on the beach—not even the kids on dates, strolling hand in hand down the sand towards the pier—was dressed like she was. 

_Sit out here for a few more hours and you'll die of exposure. No need to walk into the ocean..._

And yet, despite the cold, the sunset streaked across the sky leaving fire in its wake. Tangerine oranges and pinks that stained the clouds like cherries, all blending together, swirling and churning and descending, finally, into a misty haze of blues and purples behind her, to the east, where the sky had long been vacated by the warmth of the sun. But there, right in front of her, the colours dripped into the water, shimmering splashes in the ocean’s distorted looking glass. Colour so vibrant that for a moment, Audrey forgot it was cold, warmed as she was by the tones that mingled above her head and in the waves; she wanted to run into the paint she was certain she’d find if she waded out far enough into the water. Colour that pure couldn’t exist anywhere except on an artist’s palette. 

It comforted her to think about it that way, so poetically. She wanted someone to share her observations with. But that someone was still sleeping in an upstairs bedroom, probably very much like she’d left him and just like every other time. 

Except…

When she’d roused just after the dawn that arrived like a freight train and with about as much elegance. Audrey felt as though she’d gone to bed drunk, and had spent the morning in a state of hungover confusion that mellowed into silent worry as the heat of the day settled down into her marrow. She turned the TV on but she didn’t watch; she kept one ear trained on the upstairs bedroom, fearing the inevitable confrontation, where she’d find out how much Dale really remembered. 

Thinking about it now made her stomach churn. Like it did every time, every morning after, when the realization of her terrible deeds raced back to confront her. It wasn't the first time that, in a moment of abject weakness, she had given in.

_Albert never lost control,_ she thought as her shame continued to climb. _Albert would have never done what you did...what you continue to do. Time and time again._

With a great heaving sigh, Audrey pushed herself to her feet and decided to walk in an effort to get warm. The call of the ocean, lapping at the shore just a few steps away, was strong, and even though she knew it was stupid, she answered it. Ten slow, deliberate paces later, the cold Pacific water was swirling around her ankles, and wet sand was covering her toes as the waves eroded the ground on which she stood and she felt herself sinking, sinking, sinking…

She shoved her arms across her chest and looked up. The sun was inching closer to the horizon by the minute. It wouldn’t be long before it disappeared completely. The world would go dark again; the velvet black tapestry of the night sky would stretch across the firmament and blot out all but the faintest pinpoints of illumination, star shine from hundreds of light years away. There would be no comfort in _that_ sky, the one that hid itself behind clouds of smog and reflected streetlight and looked so different from the one she knew. But _this_ one, the one that spilled like lemonade across her skin, let her linger in that place between the grace of the sun and the sins of moonlight. A half light, full of half-truths. She shut her eyes and faced the setting star, letting its weakened rays warm her face as her toes tingled from the cold. 

Audrey didn’t know how much time had passed, but soon she became dimly aware of the sound of her mobile phone ringing from within the confines of her sweater pocket. She didn’t have to answer to know who it would be. She had been putting off the inevitable call all day because she didn't know what to tell him, and she wasn't sure she could lie to him either. 

Now, with his intrusion, she realized she no longer had a choice. 

Audrey pulled the phone from her pocket, staring at it in her hand as if it were a piece of alien technology. It rang three more times before she flipped it open and answered.

"Hello?"

"Audrey? What happened? Is everything okay?" Albert demanded on the other end.

She felt her throat closing up at the sound of his voice, and fought with every fibre of her being to keep the tears at bay. Her silence was conspicuous; on the other end of the line, Albert began to lose his carefully-managed sense of control.

"Audrey...god, please talk to me."

"Everything's okay," she said finally. “He’s fine. We’re here. He’s sleeping.”

"Are you okay?" he asked. "Are you hurt? Did anything happen?"

Audrey groaned. "Albert, please..."

He was silent on the other end for a very long moment before replying. “Okay.”

She stared out at the waves as they crashed against the shoreline, swirling around her legs and bringing a silvery sparkling shimmer to the damp sand behind her. She was several yards away from the dry sand in which she’d previously been sitting. The water, when it arrived, reached her shins. 

Audrey sniffled, looking up and away from the cold clarity of the Pacific and toward the pastel sorbet swirling above her head.

Once again, with absent-minded worry, she twirled the ring on the third finger of her left hand, pressing her thumb to the band as she spun it. The simple gold band, sitting atop a ring of irritated skin, red and inflamed. Around both wrists, the lesions from her bonds the night before screamed in anger; where the skin had broken she’d cleaned the blood as best she could, and now long and thin scabs marked off the place where the rope had been tied and strained against. She shut her eyes and held her breath.

"When are you coming home?" he asked.

"As soon as he can make the trip,” she said, trying to sound casual. “You know how he can be after this kind of thing." 

"I'll fly out now," he said, barely waiting for her to finish. "I can be there just after midnight, your time.”

In the brief pause between Albert’s last word and Audrey’s next breath, Audrey played that movie to the end of the reel. She imagined him arriving, bringing his calming presence with him as he took charge and set things to rights. There would be another set of hands, another person to talk to. They’d devise new strategies, work out a new game plan. They’d drink pots of coffee and spread their notes on the table overlooking the ocean, staying up late into the night. If Dale was well enough he’d join them; then it would be the three of them with their heads together, bent low in the glow of a sunset just like this one, like they’d done all those years ago…

But of course it wouldn’t be like that; it could never be like it used to be, ever again. The last time he'd been there, things were simpler; now she knew that Albert would arrive and would know, instantly, what was wrong because he’d always been able to read her like a cheap tabloid. And she knew wouldn’t be able to handle the way she knew he would look at her when he realized the risks she’d taken and the trust she’d broken doing what she’d done or how often she'd done it. He’d arrive, yes, and he’d take one look at her, at him, and his brilliant mind would piece it all together, and he’d march upstairs and set his things in an empty bedroom and professionally demand that they get to work, but she’d never be able to look him in the eye. Dale would be none the wiser. And Audrey would be more alone than ever, naked as ever in her guilt over the countless times she'd taken advantage, used him to sate her own desire, lying to everyone…

”No, Albert, it's okay," she told him. "Really. It won't be more than a day or so. Three at the most."

The long silence on the other end of the line wasn't disconcerting; a silent Albert was sometimes better than a talking one. Silence meant he was thinking, and thinking meant he wasn’t yelling, and yelling almost always led to cutting insults and she wasn’t in the frame of mind to handle that.

"Three days, huh?” he asked.

_Three days,_ she thought. _Three more days, here, with Dale…_

Memories of the night before rushed back in fits and starts, matching the cadence of the tide that pushed up her legs and made her breath catch in her throat and pushed her back a step with the force of its momentum. She shut her eyes, squeezing them tight, as the tenderness between her legs flared up and her stomach bottomed out. 

_He can never know…_

She exhaled. ”Three days.”

Satisfied, he let her go, on the condition that she called with updates regularly, starting with the next morning. She acquiesced, even though she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep the promise anyway. He hung up and she kept the phone pressed to her ear for a long moment before folding it back up and depositing it into her pocket once again.

Audrey took a step forward, into the ocean waves, feeling the water as it crested just below her knees. She no longer had much feeling in her lower legs; growing numb from the cold, the pins and needles sensation had begun to subside. Her biology classes in university and courses she took at the Academy flooded back to her, and she recalled the lessons about body temperature and capillaries and things like frostbite and hypothermia. 

She took another step. Then another. And then one more. The water crept up over her knees now when the waves came in. One more step and it reached the tender skin of her high inner thigh. She wondered how many more it would take for it to reach the juncture of her thighs? Two? Three? How many until it reached her heart? How many until the water replaced air? Until she could go to sleep and forget what she craved? What she’d done? How she’d violated the only person she’d ever loved? How she’d given in to the desires that had always lived within her, dormant, like the trees of her hometown in the dead of winter?

The sun was just about resting on the distant horizon when she heard the faint sound of the sliding door on the patio behind her. Her own name, traveling from his lips, reached her ears, once, and then again, and then by the third time growing panicked as he raced from the beach house towards her.

Audrey stopped walking as he reached the water’s edge, and she heard the sound as he dashed into the waves. Her shorts were wet; the bottom hem of her sweater, too, was soaked. She wondered if the mobile phone was ruined. She didn’t care.

She felt the warmth of a blanket thrown around her shoulders, his hands on her upper arms as he turned her away from the setting sun to face him, wrapping the blanket tightly around her.

“You’re freezing!” he yelled over the sudden roar of the ocean. 

She looked up at him, seeing his freshly washed and clean-shaven face, etched with concern and confusion and fear. 

Everything snapped back into focus then, and her breath began to hitch in her throat. She had resisted crying until then, but as the warmth of the blanket and the frigid cold of the water and the spicy scent of his body wash assaulted her senses, she was no longer able to hold back. She threw her arms around him and wept, openly, into his pullover sweater.

He led her out of the water and to the shore, and as they reached dry land, she fell to the sand. Dale sank down beside her and tucked the blanket around her soaking wet legs, now the colour of salmon flesh.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “What were you _thinking_?”

There was nothing to say, no answer to his question. The sun was just touching the water now, casting golden reflections across the waves; within minutes, Audrey knew the light would be gone and all that they’d have left would be the streaks of colour in the sky to let them know that the sun had been there at all. She didn’t take her eyes off the water.

“You’ve been crying.”

She nodded. “I’m okay.”

He pointed to the water. “You were waist-deep in freezing water, wearing nothing at all…” His voice had an edge to it that he didn’t bother trying to soften. “What were you doing in the water?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. And honestly, she _didn’t_ know. “I’m sorry. I’m supposed to be on duty, I’m here for you…I-I just walked out, and—”

She broke down and he continued to stroke her back though the blanket. 

“It’s okay…” he soothed. “How did I get here?”

“You took a plane,” she told him, before realizing that wasn’t the answer to his question. Composing herself, she focused her mind on the facts of the last forty-eight hours. “You flew out on Saturday night. It’s Monday now. I caught up with you last night at a bar on Sunset.” She sniffled. “Sam gave me a new compound to try. I put some in your drink. It worked. I drove you here. You’ve been sleeping pretty much since we arrived.”

“Pretty much?” he asked. 

“Mm-hmm,” Audrey said, her voice rising in pitch as she swallowed the truth. _Pretty much covers all manner of sins._ “I just let you sleep. I didn’t want to—”

“Audrey?”

“Hm?”

Dale paused, and when she lifted her eyes to his face she could see that he could see the abrasions on her wrists. She blushed and attempted to cover them with her sleeves, but he was quicker. With incredible tenderness, he pushed back the dampened but loose sleeve of her sweater, first on her right and then her left arm, and took in the full sight of the damage to her skin.

With unnerving calm in his voice, he asked the question. “When did this happen?”

She couldn’t lie to him. “Last night,” she whispered, teeth still on edge, sobs pulling themselves from within. 

She watched as his face crumpled acutely, but he stifled his emotion and held her hands in his, clutching her frozen fingers. “Tell me. Everything.”

“There’s not much to tell.”

“How did you get these?” he demanded, exposing her wrists to her. 

She yanked her hands out of his. “Forget it, Dale.”

Audrey didn’t want to look at him anymore, but it was impossible not to; she lifted her eyes to his and saw the pain and anguish that always clouded him over every time he came to, demanding answers for the blanks in his memory. He gripped her fingers in his and lifted them to his lips, pressing kisses to her skin, lingering on the gold band. “I didn’t…I don’t…I don’t know what I don’t know, Audrey. I can't remember what I don't remember..."

He shut his eyes and kept his lips pressed tightly to her knuckles, while Audrey's stomach once more hit the ground floor of her insides. The words he'd spoken, so similar to the ones he'd uttered the night before, inverted and distorted in meaning but essentially the same; like the second side to a coin that Dale and Dale alone was able to flip. 

_Does he know?_

"What did you say?" she asked.

Dale let go of her hands and set them on her lap. Once again taking in the sight of the lesions on her wrists, he furrowed his brow. “Audrey, did we—?”

Audrey blanched, and did her level best to avoid letting her startled state show. “Dale…”

His face hardened; it was difficult to read him. So she didn’t try. 

“We should get you inside, dry you off—” he began, his voice taking on the timbre of driftwood, grey and old and worn. 

Audrey began to weep.

"Tell me a story," she said suddenly, cutting him off. “Please?”

His confusion deepened, mixing with worry and the darkest sorrow. The fading, low-angled sunlight cast his face in shadow. Soon darkness would fall, and she wouldn’t have to see what expression he wore anymore. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for it.

”What kind of story?” he asked finally.

Audrey sniffled and dug her toes deeper into the sand. ”Any story. Any story at all," she replied, keeping her eyes shut as tears found their way out from between her lashes. "Just as long as it's one where it's easy to tell who the bad guys are and who are the good guys."

Dale sighed, and Audrey felt it in her solar plexus. _He knows_ , she thought. _He knows…_

"It's not always so cut and dried as good and bad, Audrey," he said. “Not in the real world.”

_You're not helping_ , she wanted to say. But she bit her tongue and silenced her reprimand. Because she knew he was right; he so often was. Here in the City of Angels, on the edge of the world, where roads could cut through the darkest of dark and still lead you straight to the glimmering water's edge, where sand and surf and the laughter of tourists covered up the misdeeds going on in the upstairs bedrooms down the beach—here, of all places, it was possible to see good and bad, angels and demons, nestled side by side and mixing and pushing and swirling together no matter which way you turned.

“Let’s go inside, okay? I found some take out menus in the kitchen,” he continued, with complete mastery of deflection and denial. “You can take a shower, get warmed up. We’ll order in. We don’t have to do anything, or be anywhere. We can relax. Just you and me.”

“But Dale—”

He pulled her towards him, effectively cutting her off with the abrupt movement. "Forget it, Audrey," he whispered, echoing her edict from moment earlier as he allowed her body to form to his, curling and tucking her into his side until her head rested delicately on his shoulder. 

It hadn’t been so long since he'd held her that she’d forgotten what it was like, but enough had transpired to make it feel foreign. His gentle manner stripped her bare, and she found herself lacking, undeserving of anything except his cruellest words, spoken in his darkest moments, all of which flooded back to her with alarming alacrity. Like a festering wound suddenly exposed to air, she ached and burned and wanted nothing more than to cut the damaged flesh away or hack off the limb in which it sat. 

But it was with increasingly clarity that she realized it was her very soul that rankled, and excising _that_ wasn’t going to be so easy.

So she began to sob, openly, as Dale’s hands soothed up and down her back. 

“It was wrong,” she choked out. “It was wrong. I was wrong. I’m wrong. It’s all wrong…”

“It’s all right, Audrey.”

For a very long moment, she sat in the warmth of an embrace she didn’t deserve, from a man who needed her to be someone she could no longer be. Guilt filled her like bile as her strength and resolve faded in tandem with the sun. When the glowing disk finally disappeared below the horizon, she found herself wishing she hadn’t turned back towards him, fallen back into his orbit. She wished she’d kept on walking, setting out a clear path towards a different celestial body, one that was drowning in the ocean waves. She wanted to drown in the ocean waves, too. How easy it would have been, to let the strength of the water carry her body away from the shoreline, from him, from everything she'd done wrong.

But she hadn’t. And now here she was. 

“It’s all right.” He repeated it, his lips against her hair, his breath warm on her scalp. “It’s all right…it’s all right…”

She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t think she ever would. But she nodded. “Okay,” she finally whispered into his shirt. It wasn’t, but they weren’t strangers to lies, and this was but a drop in the bucket.

Night would fall; it was already falling, stretching out before them like the roads that brought them to the very ends of the earth the night before. Like all the roads she'd ever travelled away from the cheerless mists that shrouded her home and the gloom that veiled it from her even when she was there walking its streets. Like it or not, this is where she lived now, on pitch-black Delphian plateaus between the last time Dale tried to kill her and the next.

Ironically, it was the only place she'd ever felt alive.

Audrey knew how her night would go. They’d make a pot of coffee. They’d order supper. She'd probably take a nap, safe in the knowledge that he had never had a relapse so soon after a shift. And then, after he'd fallen asleep—whether she was at his side or not—she would ponder how the shadows of her darkest desires had come to stand between her and her better angels, and whether or when she'd ever get to see their full glory again.

^♢^

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm sorry this has no happy ending. And that it's dark and twisty and angsty, or at least angstier than my previous stuff. I really just wanted to explore Audrey's dark side and see what she could be pushed to, what she'd do in this situation. Thanks for sticking with me and this story! I hope you've liked it, even though it's squicky in parts and definitely full of questionable behaviour...


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